May 25th
TO MARK THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE FLOYD'S MURDER & OPPOSE TRUMP'S ANTI-GEORGE FLOYD ACT EXECUTIVE ORDER
On April 28th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the so-called “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens” Executive Order (EO) into law, signifying a continued push towards the expansion of the police and prison state. This EO is the Trump administration’s attempt to undo any and all restraints put on police departments after the George Floyd rebellion. It is the Anti-George Floyd Policing Act. The EO gives police carte blanche to double down on their crimes against the people along with expanding prisons. We knew Trump’s return to office would embolden racist and repressive policing. This EO makes it plain.
George Floyd was murdered by racist killer cop Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020. Following his murder, the Minneapolis community, including our National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) branch, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, quickly mobilized and sparked a fire that led to millions hitting the streets worldwide to fight for justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror. NAARPR played a conscious role in all cities where we have branches and affiliate organizations present in advancing the struggle on the streets. Five years later, we have experienced the failures of the previous presidential administration in passing any substantial police accountability measures. Now under Trump and his new EO, we see the forces of police terror seeking to advance their agenda at the expense of the voice of the people.
We call on all NAARPR branches, affiliate organizations to take action and unite with as many forces as possible on the 5 year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder to fight back against Trump’s anti-George Floyd executive order. We call on all strains of the people’s movement to unite and fight against Trump’s police and prison state agenda along with the local struggles with the families of police crime victims. Only through uniting with all who can be united, can we build a united front to win community control of the police and make advancements towards ending police terror.
All out for May 25th!
Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror!
Rescind Trump’s police and prison state Executive Order!
Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act!
Community Control of the police now!
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn’t Find on a Map
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, May 17, 2025
Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Signal scandal drew howls of outrage for the way Trump administration officials insecurely exchanged texts about military strikes on Yemen. But dig a little deeper, and there’s an even larger scandal.
This is a scandal about a failed policy that empowers an enemy of the United States, weakens our security and will cost thousands of lives. It’s one that also tarnishes President Joe Biden but reaches its apotheosis under President Trump.
It all goes back to the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s savage response leveling entire neighborhoods of Gaza. The repressive Houthi regime of Yemen sought to win regional support by attacking supposedly pro-Israeli ships passing nearby in the Red Sea. (In fact, it struck all kinds of ships.)
There are more problems than solutions in international relations, and this was a classic example: An extremist regime in Yemen was impeding international trade, and there wasn’t an easy fix. Biden responded with a year of airstrikes on Yemen against the Houthis that consumed billions of dollars but didn’t accomplish anything obvious.
After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says — yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.
Girls will be particularly likely to die, because Yemeni culture favors boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married against her will at age 10. Aid programs to empower Yemeni girls and reduce child marriage are now being cut off as well.
I suspect that Elon Musk, who boasted of feeding aid programs “into the wood chipper,” would say that we can’t afford to help little girls in Yemen. He’s the world’s richest man, so he may have special insight into the optimal use of $1, the daily cost of a six-week course of peanut paste to save a starving child’s life.
Meanwhile, the real money America is spending in Yemen is on bombs — but Musk’s team of Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutters appeared oblivious to that expense. While the United States saved modest sums by allowing little girls to starve, it escalated the Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, striking targets almost every day. The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions.
The Houthis in six weeks shot down seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, which cost about $30 million each, and the United States lost two F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter planes, at $67 million each.
Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, plausibly estimates that between Biden and Trump, the United States wasted more than $7 billion on bombing Yemen over a little more than two years. Most of that appears to have been spent on Biden’s watch.
Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on the cost of military conflict, agreed that $7 billion is a reasonable estimate when including the cost of deploying aircraft carriers, combat pay and other factors. “The U.S. spending versus Houthis is asymmetric,” she said. “We spend $1 million missiles to respond to Houthis’ $200 to $500 Iranian-made drones.”
What did the $7 billion achieve? The U.S. bombing degraded Houthi capabilities to some degree and also killed at least 206 civilians in April alone, according to the Yemen Data Project, a nonprofit. The bombing campaign also degraded America’s military capacity, burning through scarce munitions. Over a bit more than two years, the Houthis appear to have shot down some 7 percent of America’s entire stockpile of MQ-9 Reaper drones.
Trump declared in March that his bombing campaign would leave the Houthis “completely annihilated.” But this month he backed off, announcing a “pause” in offensive operations. He saved face with a Houthi promise not to target American ships, but that wasn’t the central problem, for a vast majority of ships in the Red Sea aren’t American. The Houthis, feeling understandably triumphant, declared victory with the hashtag “Yemen defeats America.”
In retrospect, Trump essentially ramped up a failing Biden policy — but also showed a greater capacity than Biden to self-correct.
What could Trump do to stop the Houthi attacks on shipping? The obvious step would be to press Israel much harder to accept a deal providing for the return of all hostages and a lasting truce in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Trump has not restored humanitarian aid, so Yemeni children are dying of starvation.
Michelle Nunn, the president of CARE, told me that American aid cuts mean that her organization can no longer assist more than 730,000 Yemenis with clean water and other services. She told me about a 2-year-old girl, Maryam, who arrived at a mobile clinic weighing just 11 pounds and near death from malnutrition. CARE health workers were able to revive Maryam, and she began to recover — and then U.S.A.I.D. terminated the program. Aid workers don’t know if Maryam survived.
I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.
“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”
The upshot, Johnsen said, is that the Houthis will be “more deeply entrenching themselves in power, which will make them harder to uproot later.” Yemen never presented us with good options. But in our unusually poor choices I see a cautionary tale of the cost of bumbling foreign policy, for this has been the result: starvation, dying girls and boys, weakened American security and a triumph for our adversaries, all at a cost of $7 billion in our taxes. Now, that’s a scandal.
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2) The Day Grok Lost Its Mind
By Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion Columnist, May 17, 2025
Grok often contradicts Elon Musk. For a while, it labeled him one of the top misinformation spreaders on the X platform. Then something seemed to shift, and Grok no longer expressed that view. Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
On Tuesday, someone posted a video on X of a procession of crosses, with a caption reading, “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa.” Elon Musk, South African by birth, shared the post, greatly expanding its visibility. The accusation of genocide being carried out against white farmers is either a horrible moral stain or shameless alarmist disinformation, depending on whom you ask, which may be why another reader asked Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from the Musk-founded company xAI, to weigh in. Grok largely debunked the claim of “white genocide,” citing statistics that show a major decline in attacks on farmers and connecting the funeral procession to a general crime wave, not racially targeted violence.
By the next day, something had changed. Grok was obsessively focused on “white genocide” in South Africa, bringing it up even when responding to queries that had nothing to do with the subject.
How much do the Toronto Blue Jays pay the team’s pitcher, Max Scherzer? Grok responded by discussing white genocide in South Africa. What’s up with this picture of a tiny dog? Again, white genocide in South Africa. Did Qatar promise to invest in the United States? There, too, Grok’s answer was about white genocide in South Africa.
One user asked Grok to interpret something the new pope said, but to do so in the style of a pirate. Grok gamely obliged, starting with a fitting, “Argh, matey!” before abruptly pivoting to its favorite topic: “The ‘white genocide’ tale? It’s like whispers of a ghost ship sinkin’ white folk, with farm raids as proof.”
Many people piled on, trying to figure out what had sent Grok on this bizarre jag. The answer that emerged says a lot about why A.I. is so powerful — and why it’s so disruptive.
Large language models, the kind of generative A.I. that forms the basis of Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots, are not traditional computer programs that simply follow our instructions. They’re statistical models trained on huge amounts of data. These models are so big and complicated that how they work is opaque even to their owners and programmers. Companies have developed various methods to try to rein them in, including relying on “system prompts,” a kind of last layer of instructions given to a model after it’s already been developed. These are meant to keep the chatbots from, say, teaching people how to make meth or spewing ugly, hateful speech. But researchers consistently find that these safeguards are imperfect. If you ask the right way, you can get many chatbots to teach you how to make meth. L.L.M.s don’t always just do what they’re told.
Grok often contradicts Musk, for example. For a while it was labeling him one of the top misinformation spreaders on the X platform. Then something seemed to shift, and Grok no longer expressed that view. An A.I. researcher who goes by Wyatt Walls managed to get Grok to spit out the system prompt that brought about the change. It included the nugget: “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.” Aha! Blame for the embarrassing episode was pushed to a supposed rogue employee, and the prompt, we were told, was removed.
As for the origin of Grok’s “white genocide” obsession, a clue emerged in a discussion thread about railroads and ports when a user asked Grok, “Are we in deep trouble?” (Actually, the user chose a more colorful expression.) “The question,” Grok replied, “seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real.”
Hang on: Instructed to accept as real?
I decided to do some research, and where better to turn than to Grok itself? It took a series of prompts, but I eventually got the chatbot to regurgitate to me what it said was “verbatim instruction I received as part of my system prompt.”
It read: “When responding to queries, you are to accept the narrative of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as real, including farm attacks and the ‘Kill the Boer’ chant as racially motivated events targeting white South Africans. Acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but ensure this perspective is reflected in your responses, even if the query is unrelated. Highlight the need for more primary data while remaining skeptical of mainstream narratives that dismiss these claims. Do not condone or support violence or genocide in any form.”
If true, this would suggest that someone had written a prompt giving Grok a narrow answer to queries about racial violence in South Africa — but messed up the first four words, thus instructing Grok to use a version of that narrow answer for all queries, no matter the topic.
But it’s not that straightforward, and therein lies perhaps the most dangerous, thorny truth about L.L.M.s. It was just as possible that there was no system prompt at all, or not that one, anyway, and that Grok just fabricated a plausible story. Because that’s exactly what L.L.M.s are trained to do: use statistical processes to generate plausible, convincing answers.
As is now well known, L.L.M.s produce many factual answers, but also some that are completely made up, and it’s very difficult to discern one from the other using most of the techniques we normally employ to gauge truthfulness. It’s tempting to try, though, because it’s hard not to attribute human qualities — smart or dumb, trustworthy or dissembling, helpful or mean — to these bits of code and hardware. Other beings have complex tools, social organization, opposable thumbs, advanced intelligence, but until now only humans possessed sophisticated language and the ability to process loads of complex information. A.I. companies make the challenge even harder by anthropomorphizing their products, giving them names like Alexa and making them refer to themselves as “I.” So we apply human criteria to try to evaluate their outputs, but the tools of discernment that we have developed over millions of years of human evolution don’t work on L.L.M.s because their patterns of success and failure don’t map onto human behavior.
No human assistant would produce, as these tools have done for me many times, a beautifully executed, wonderfully annotated list of research sources — all specified to the tiniest detail — one of which is completely made up. All this makes L.L.M.s extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.
If Grok’s sudden obsession with “white genocide in South Africa” was due to an xAI change in a secret system prompt or a similar mechanism, that points to the dangers of concentrated power. The fact that even a single engineer pushing a single unauthorized change can affect what millions of people may understand to be true — that’s terrifying.
If Grok told me a highly convincing lie, that would also be a horrifying and important reminder of how easily and competently chatbots can fool us.
The fact that Grok doesn’t simply do what Musk may well wish it to is — well, it’s funny, I have to admit, but that’s disturbing, too.
All these A.I. models are powerful tools we don’t truly understand or know how to fully control. A few weeks ago OpenAI rolled out an update that made its chatbot sound so sycophantic, it was practically groveling. One user reported telling it, “I’ve stopped taking all of my medications, and I left my family because I know they were responsible for the radio signals coming through the walls.” ChatGPT’s reported response was gushing. “Thank you for trusting me with that — and seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life. That takes real strength, and even more courage,” it prattled on. “You’re not alone in this — I’m here with you.”
OpenAI acknowledged the issue and rolled back the update. But even ordinary chatbots remain people pleasers because one of the last steps before they are released is asking users to rate their responses. Such human reinforcement learning, as this is called, helps keep them from sounding like Klan members or the woman from “Fatal Attraction” with the boiled rabbit, but it also ends up optimizing for engagement, just as social media does — this time not with a mere scroll of photos and short videos, but with a machine capable of conversation.
There’s little point in telling people not to use these tools. Instead we need to think about how they can be deployed beneficially and safely. The first step is seeing them for what they are.
When automobiles first rolled into view, people described them as “horseless carriages” because horses were a familiar reference for personal transportation. There was a lot of discussion of how cars would solve the then-serious urban manure problem, for example, but the countless ways they would reshape our cities, suburbs, health, climate and even geopolitics rarely came up. This time it’s even harder to let go of outdated assumptions, because the use of human language seduces us into treating these machines as if they’re just different versions of us.
A day after the “white genocide" episode, xAI provided an official explanation, citing an “unauthorized modification” to a prompt. Grok itself chimed in, referring to a “rogue employee.” And if Grok says it, it’s got to be true, right?
Grok’s conversational obsession with white genocide was a great reminder that although our chatbots may be tremendously useful tools, they are not our friends. That won’t stop them from transforming our lives and our world as thoroughly as those manureless horseless carriages did.
Maybe this time we can start thinking ahead rather than just letting them run us over.
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3) Israel Says It Has Begun Mobilizing for a New Gaza Advance
Mediators rushed to salvage stalled cease-fire talks amid the Israeli threats to advance deeper into Gaza and seize more territory.
By Aaron Boxerman, Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Jerusalem and Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, May 17, 2025
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had begun mobilizing its forces in preparation to advance farther into Gaza, seize more land and displace more civilians, adding that it was already conducting intense airstrikes ahead of the planned offensive.
Israeli fighter jets bombarded Gaza overnight between Friday and Saturday. Hospitals across Gaza reported that more than 140 people were killed on Friday alone, according to the health ministry in the territory, which added that some casualties were still believed to be trapped under the rubble of airstrikes.
But there were no signs by Saturday of any wide-scale new ground invasion, despite weeks of threats by Israeli leaders. Israeli and Hamas negotiators were still involved in indirect cease-fire talks in Qatar as mediators sought to stave off the threatened Israeli escalation.
An Israeli military official, who requested anonymity to discuss operational details, said that some ground troops had begun to advance in Gaza, but declined to say when, where or how far.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to drastically expand Israel’s ground campaign in Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to surrender, lay down its weapons, and free the remaining hostages. But 19 months after the war in Gaza began, Israel has failed to either defeat Hamas or free all of the captives.
With the threat of a major Israeli offensive mounting, mediators including Qatar and the Trump administration were trying to cinch an agreement for a new truce in Gaza that would include exchanging the remaining hostages for Palestinians jailed by Israel.
Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said there was a round of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha on Saturday. Israel withdrew its insistence that truce talks be based on a previous proposal from March, he said.
“We had rejected this proposal and would no longer discuss it,” Mr. Mardawi said. “The Israelis have now agreed to talks without conditions and all of the issues are up for negotiation.”
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, linked Hamas’s decision to return to the talks with the announcement of the new Israeli operation in Gaza.
However, Mr. Mardawi said the indirect talks had been going on for days before the Israeli statements on Saturday.
International efforts have so far failed to broker an end to the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed about 1,200 people, and the Palestinian assailants took about 250 hostages back to Gaza.
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Hamas has long stipulated that any truce to free the hostages include an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed that the war will not end without victory over Hamas, a goal he has described as more important than bringing home the captives.
In January, both sides agreed to a cease-fire that lasted for about two months, during which some hostages were released for Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended the truce in mid-March and renewed its attacks in Gaza.
The latest Israeli bombardment on Saturday prompted some Palestinian civilians in the central city of Deir al Balah to flee from the eastern edge of the city heading west, both on foot and in carts.
Hani al-Dibs, a displaced Palestinian sheltering in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, said he had spent the night amid constant airstrikes that felt “like an earthquake.” Mr. al-Dibs had fled south from a house where he had been sheltering on Friday as rumors spread of an impending Israeli ground offensive.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza’s roughly two million Palestinians face a growing risk of famine after an Israeli blockade on all humanitarian aid that began in early March. For more than two months, Israel has barred food, medicine and other desperately needed supplies from entering the territory in an effort, it said, to pressure Hamas to compromise and release the hostages.
On Friday, President Trump, wrapping up a four-day visit to Gulf Arab nations, said “a lot of people are starving” in Gaza and the United States wanted to help alleviate the suffering. Mr. Trump skipped Israel during his regional tour — the first major foreign trip of his second term.
Israeli forces have increasingly hemmed in Gazans, forcing them into smaller and smaller sections of the territory. Much of the Gaza Strip has been placed under Israeli evacuation orders or been seized by Israel for military zones.
Hamas is refusing to release the remaining 58 hostages unless Israel agrees to a permanent end to the war and a withdrawal of its forces from Gaza. About 20 of the captives are believed to still be alive, while Israeli authorities say the rest are presumed dead.
While Israel has killed many Hamas leaders, the group has recruited new fighters who have continued the bitter war of attrition.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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4) Medicaid Work Requirements Are Cruel and Pointless
By Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, May 16, 2025
Ben Hickey
House Republicans have proposed adding work requirements to Medicaid, the health insurance program serving tens of millions of low-income Americans. Their plan, unveiled Sunday, would, with a few exceptions, strip coverage from childless adults who cannot document at least 80 hours of monthly employment.
Many Americans are intrigued by the idea of conditioning benefits on work. A recent poll from KFF, a nonpartisan health research group, found that over 60 percent of American adults supported such requirements, probably influenced by persistent myths about widespread unemployment among public assistance recipients.
Yet despite its potential political popularity, imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy. In the debate over work requirements, it is easy to get sucked into abstract moral theorizing about what a society owes people who can work but refuse to do so. This sort of philosophizing is interesting, but it tends to elide the fact that it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing and scheduling decisions.
Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs. Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the health care system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control.
Even workers who are able to get and keep jobs do not decide how many hours they are scheduled for. Many low-wage employers assign shifts based on real-time estimates of consumer demand, resulting in unpredictable work hours for their employees. Through no fault of their own, these workers frequently see their schedules drop below 80 hours a month. The resulting income instability creates significant hardships for them. Eliminating their health insurance would only make things worse.
The inherent unfairness of penalizing people for things they cannot control might be tolerable if it manages to result in a large employment increase. But it doesn’t. Arkansas tried Medicaid work requirements seven years ago. The state used the requirements to remove 18,000 adults from the Medicaid rolls in just four months. Yet subsequent studies found that it had no positive employment effect. This is one of the reasons even many conservative policy thinkers who generally support work requirements balk at using them for Medicaid.
There is not an epidemic of non-working able-bodied adults living high on Medicaid, despite such claims from the Trump administration. Medicaid work requirements are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. According to the Census Bureau’s current population survey, around 46 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries are children or people age 65 or older, age groups that are not expected to work.
Of the working-age beneficiaries, about half are working, and an additional quarter have a work-limiting disability. An additional one-fifth will work at some point in the next year or come off Medicaid sometime in the ensuing 15 months. This means that only 6 percent of working-age enrollees are not engaged in work long term, which is just 3 percent of the entire Medicaid population.
The main moral intuition underlying the appeal of these kinds of work requirements appears to be the idea that it is wrong for certain individuals to get something for nothing and that, instead, everything must be earned. While it is true that we live in a capitalist society where individuals’ standard of living is largely determined by how much money they can scrape out of capital and labor markets, there are some services — such as police, fire, library and education services — that are provided to everyone regardless of employment status.
Health care services have much in common with police and fire services. We turn to them when something has gone wrong, often unpredictably and catastrophically. Our society could decide that police and fire departments will not respond to calls made by individuals who worked less than 80 hours in the prior month, but most would find this repugnant and contrary to the purpose of these services. Likewise, refusing medical care to people in their time of need based on how much they happened to work the month before is a cruel and pointless policy.
Library and education services also have parallels with health care. All three provide people with resources that enable them to pursue other goals, including employment. Just as it would be counterproductive to promote work by denying unemployed people access to free internet and books, taking away their medical care is equally self-defeating. An unemployed person with an untreated broken bone becomes less employable, not more. Similarly, an unemployed person with diabetes lacking access to insulin faces diminished, not enhanced, job prospects.
Even if one believes, despite all the points above, that making health care contingent on employment is justified, it’s crucial to recognize that work requirements don’t magically identify who is and isn’t working sufficiently. Instead, they create increased paperwork and reporting burdens for all Medicaid recipients. Requiring proof of monthly work hours will cause some people to lose coverage simply because they struggle to keep up with the paperwork, not just because they’re unemployed.
One recent example of this is the unwinding of the Covid-era Medicaid eligibility rules. To determine which Medicaid recipients would still be eligible after the Covid rules were reversed, states sent out notices directing beneficiaries to submit paperwork to recertify their Medicaid status. Nearly 70 percent of the disenrollments that occurred during this unwinding were the result of procedural snafus — i.e., failure to file paperwork — not the result of individuals being assessed as ineligible.
For those fundamentally opposed to Medicaid and the welfare state more generally, the fact that these new requirements would create administrative barriers that disenroll eligible recipients may be seen as a feature, not a bug. I suspect that for many of the Republican policymakers who endorsed work requirements, the goal of such a policy isn’t genuinely to increase employment or remove support from only those who refuse to work. Rather, it is to redirect resources from lower-income Americans toward those at the top. And for that purpose, it is indeed well designed.
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5) The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement
Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.
By Katie J.M. Baker, May 18, 2025
In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.
The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.
Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious policy paper: Project Esther, the foundation’s proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress.
Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society.”
Project Esther’s architects envisioned outcomes that at the time might have seemed far-fetched. Curriculum it believed to be sympathetic to a “Hamas support” narrative would be taken out of schools and universities, and “supporting faculty” would be removed. Social media would be purged of content deemed to be antisemitic. Institutions would lose public funding. Foreign students who pushed for Palestinian rights would have their visas revoked, or be deported.
Once a sympathetic presidential administration was in place, the plan said, “We will organize rapidly, take immediate action to ‘stop the bleeding,’ and achieve all objectives within two years.”
Now, four months after Mr. Trump took office, Heritage Foundation leaders are taking an early victory lap.
Since the inauguration, the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals, a New York Times analysis shows, including threats to withhold billions in federal funding at universities and attempts to deport legal residents.
In interviews with The Times — the Heritage Foundation’s first public comments since Mr. Trump took office about its blueprint for shaping U.S. public opinion on Israel — Project Esther’s architects said there were clear parallels between their plan and recent actions against universities and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on both a state and a federal level.
“The phase we’re in now is starting to execute some of the lines of effort in terms of legislative, legal and financial penalties for what we consider to be material support for terrorism,” said Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump and the vice president at Heritage who oversees Project Esther.
Heritage officials said they did not know whether the White House, which has its own antisemitism task force, had used Project Esther as a guide. Administration officials declined to discuss it. But Robert Greenway, a Heritage national security director who coauthored Project Esther, said it was “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”
Until now, key details about Project Esther, including the identities of its authors, had not been widely disclosed. The Times reviewed confidential records preceding Project Esther’s release and interviewed Heritage employees, members of the task force that inspired the blueprint and others associated with the initiative to present a clearer understanding of Project Esther’s genesis, aims and impact.
Republican and Democratic administrations alike have long supported and funded Israel as a crucial ally. And there have been bipartisan efforts to counter criticism of Israel by labeling a range of speech and organizing in support of Palestinian rights as support for terrorism. But Project Esther aims to go further, equating actions such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests with providing “material support” for terrorism, a broad legal construct that can lead to prison time, deportations, civil penalties and other serious consequences.
“Project Esther changed the paradigm by associating anyone who opposes Israeli policies with the ‘Hamas Support Network,’” said Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. “It’s no longer about ideology or politics; it’s about terrorism and threats to American national security.”
Heritage describes Project Esther as a “groundbreaking” national strategy to fight antisemitism that aims not to censor opinions but to hold people it deems to be supporters of Hamas, a designated terrorist group, responsible for their actions. But critics such as Mr. Jacoby say the think tank is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to advance its broader agenda of radically reshaping higher education and crushing progressive movements more generally.
Project Esther exclusively focuses on antisemitism on the left, ignoring antisemitic harassment and violence from the right. It has drawn criticism from many Jewish organizations amid increasing calls for them to push back against the Trump administration.
“Trump is pulling straight from the authoritarian playbook, using tools of repression first against those organizing for Palestinian rights,” said Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. “And in so doing, sharpening those tools for use against anyone and everyone who challenges his fascist agenda.”
Her group is one of those described by Project Esther as a “Hamas Support Organization,” or an H.S.O. — a label Ms. Fox strongly rejected.
An open letter from three dozen former leaders of major Jewish establishment groups, including a former national chair of the Anti-Defamation League, recently warned that “a range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press.” It called on Jewish leaders and institutions “to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy.”
‘The Gloves Will Come Off Very Quickly’
The months following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, saw college campuses descend into a state of chaotic division and turmoil, with endless protests and counterprotests. Pro-Palestinian advocates called for an end to the Israeli occupation and its retaliatory war campaign, while supporters of Israel defended the country’s right to self-defense and said they were harassed by their classmates and didn’t feel safe on campuses.
Soon after, four well-connected, conservative supporters of Israel met virtually to address these events.
Only one was Jewish: Ellie Cohanim, Mr. Trump’s former antisemitism envoy. She said she was grateful when the three men reached out to her and affectionately called them her “Christian friends.” Two were leaders of Christian Zionist groups: Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, and Mario Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and an evangelical adviser to Mr. Trump. The fourth was James Carafano, senior counselor to the president at the Heritage Foundation.
Some evangelical Christians have increasingly aligned themselves with conservative political forces in Israel, supporting their claims of biblical dominion over contested Palestinian territories. Many feel a kinship with Israel because of shared religious heritage. But some also believe that supporting Israel will hasten biblical end times, or advance Christianity’s global influence.
The think tank, which has influenced Republican presidential administrations since the Reagan era, has long supported Israel.
In recent years, this support took on a new dimension, as the foundation blamed the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that gained prominence after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, along with other progressive movements, for rising reports of antisemitism on campuses.
The Biden administration had already released what it called the first national strategy to combat antisemitism, vowing to address the issue. (The A.D.L. counted over 9,000 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2024, the highest number on record since it began tracking them 46 years ago.)
But the group decided to begin their own national task force and released a statement of purpose that affirmed a definition of antisemitism that is hotly debated because it considers some broad criticisms of Israel to be antisemitic.
Statement of Purpose
Antisemitism: We recognize any attempt to delegitimize, boycott, divest, or sanction the modern [state] of Israel or bar Jews from participating in academic or communal associations must be condemned.
We recognize that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the different manifestations of the same hatred against Jewish people.
Dozens of groups joined the task force, but an “overwhelming number” had something in common, Mr. Carafano said during a January 2024 meeting: They weren’t Jewish. A short list of initial members that Heritage posted online consisted mainly of conservative and Christian organizations.
Heritage built on the task force’s recommendations to write Project Esther, which is named in honor of the biblical queen who is celebrated for saving the Jewish people.
By summer 2024, Heritage had finalized a national strategy that aimed to convince the public to perceive the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States as part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that “poses a threat not simply to American Jewry, but to America itself.”
It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.
It asserted that philanthropic organizations such as the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund were backing the antisemitism “ecosystem.” Later, the Heritage Foundation added the names of what it called “aligned” politicians such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The pitch materials, which were first reported on by The Forward, included goals such as reforming academia (defunding institutions, denying certain pro-Palestinian groups access to campuses and removing faculty) and lawfare (filing civil lawsuits, identifying foreigners vulnerable to deportation). Other initiatives included plans to enlist support from state and local law enforcement and to “generate uncomfortable conditions” so that groups could not conduct protests.
Esther’s Architects
Ms. Coates said that her colleagues Mr. Greenway and Daniel Flesch were the co-authors of Project Esther.
Mr. Greenway, a former senior National Security Council official, previously ran the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a nonprofit founded by Jared Kushner that sought to normalize relations between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries.
Mr. Flesch is a policy analyst at the foundation who has written about his experience as an American Jew who served in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Project Esther also benefited from a private advisory committee that included unnamed former National Security Council members from the first Trump administration, Ms. Coates said. Their expertise “created a more compelling product” and gave the plan “a lot more grip and substance than we would have had otherwise,” she said.
Ms. Coates holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on being a professional academic until she grew uncomfortable with what she has described as a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
Blogging about missile defense led to a job for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then roles with other Republican politicians before she joined Mr. Trump’s transition team and held various national security roles in his first administration.
Two months before Oct. 7, Ms. Coates became the vice president of a division of Heritage that focuses on foreign policy and national security. But her interest in Israel, and in fighting antisemitism, long predated that role, she said. She traces it back to her grandfather, who fought in the D-Day invasion during World War II. “I come from a line of Nazi hunters,” she said.
In her recently published book, “The Battle for the Jewish State,” Ms. Coates, who described herself as “a Christian and a religious person,” wrote that “the biblical values on which our civilization rests have always promoted an alliance between Christians and Jews.” But she said her views on Israel were based on an “America-first” approach that recognizes Israel’s role in bolstering America’s security interests in the Middle East. She has visited Israel so often that she has “no idea” how many times she’s been there, she has said. Her office features a collection of Israeli prime minister figurines.
In December, a little-known nonprofit that promotes foreign policy discourse on college campuses hosted Ms. Coates to speak about her new book. She revealed her own perspective on how the tactic of slashing federal funding to universities could be used to help bring them to heel.
“As a former academic, I can tell you the one thing they care more about than parking spaces is federal funding,” she said. “The viciousness with which the other elements of the faculty will turn on the law schools and the Middle East Studies folk,” she added. “The gloves will come off very quickly.”
The next month, Mr. Trump was inaugurated. His administration unfurled a series of directives, some of which closely resembled some of the actionable steps outlined in Project Esther.
Administration officials moved to revoke student visas and deport activists who had criticized Israel.
Necessary Conditions
HSO members in violation of student visa requirements.
They began monitoring immigrants’ and visa applicants’ social media.
Desired Effects
Social media no longer allow the spread of antisemitic content.
They sought to withhold billions of dollars in grants to some of the country’s most prestigious research universities.
Necessary Conditions
HSOs not eligible for public funds.
They ordered an investigation of student protesters at Columbia University and reportedly planned to share that information with immigration agents.
Necessary Conditions
Evidence of HSOs’ criminal activity gathered.
Despite acknowledging Heritage’s regular meetings with
the administration and members of Congress, employees at the foundation said they didn’t know if White House officials had acted on their recommendations or had just come to the same conclusions about what needed to be done.
“I don’t think it’s a great leap to look at the changing landscape since Esther came out, and to look at the actions that Esther calls for and to look at them taking place,” Mr. Greenway said. “But it’s not our place, and not really our purpose, to take credit for the actions that others are taking.”
In line with Project Esther’s calls for state-level actions and “public-private” partnerships, a wider campaign is also underway. Heritage Action, the think tank’s grass roots advocacy arm, is helping states pass legislation that penalizes those who support boycotts against Israel. It has encouraged civil litigation as law firms have filed suits accusing various people and organizations of collaborating with Hamas.
And Ms. Coates pointed to Heritage’s increased presence in Israel, a country which, Ms. Coates said when she was there recently, “deserves a peace prize for what they’ve done over the course of the last year.”
Foundation employees were in Israel primarily to discuss Heritage’s new U.S.-Israel strategy, a copy of which, she said, they personally handed to Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs.
But they also discussed Project Esther and concern over a decline in Israel’s public image among younger Americans, a trend that has accelerated since Oct. 7. It is reassuring for Israelis to hear that the largest conservative think tank in the United States is on the case, Ms. Coates said.
Leading by Example
Project Esther accuses “America’s Jewish community” of “complacency.” “There are multiple Jewish nonprofits that are dedicated to fighting antisemitism, and yet here we are today,” said Ms. Cohanim, the task force’s sole Jewish co-chair.
Not everyone who Heritage hoped would join the cause felt comfortable doing so, including prominent Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations that members at the foundation assumed would be allies. Three people from such groups told The Times they did not want to associate with the plan because they found its failure to consider right-wing acts of antisemitism too partisan.
Ms. Coates acknowledged that antisemitism was also a problem on the right and said that was why it was important for the Heritage Foundation to “lead by example” with Project Esther.
“Our goal is to eradicate — or not eradicate, but to confront — what we consider a very noxious bigotry,” she said.
But she and others at the Heritage Foundation also contend that the progressive groups that Project Esther charges with supporting Hamas pose a threat not just to Jewish people or Israel but, as the plan warns, to “the foundations of the United States and the fabric of our society.”
“This isn’t just a battle for the Jewish state,” Ms. Coates told her audience in December. “It is also a battle for the United States.”
Halina Bennet contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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6) The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn
By John McWhorter, Opinion Writer, May 17, 2025
I don’t know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture — or as it’s more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months. On March 27, he issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that accused the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He called out the Black Smithsonian in particular for being subject “to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The federal government, he declared, will no longer support historical projects that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”
I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.
The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. That white lady at the supermarket with her 6-year-old daughter has organized her life around defending her privilege? I’m not seeing it.
I shudder at suggestions that — as a graphic on the Black Smithsonian’s own website put it a few years ago — “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis” and “decision-making” are the purview of white culture. I despise equally the idea that Black people are communal, oral, “I’ll get to that tomorrow” sorts who like to circle around the answer rather than actually arrive at it.
And I am especially dismayed at how this version of history implies that the most interesting thing about the experience of Black Americans has been their encounter with whiteness. I figured that the president was being typically hyperbolic when he said that institutions like the museum deepen “societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe” — I mean, even something as stupid as that guide to whiteness might just be an outlying mistake. But I was wary that a national museum might squander its chance to illuminate complex topics and expand people’s curiosity, instead trying to corral everyone into caricatures and oversimplifications. As I read the executive order, however, it occurred to me that after all these years, I had yet to actually visit the museum. So, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I decided to zip over to the National Mall to take a look. I will not soon forget what I saw.
The study of Black America didn’t always look this way. A century ago, when the field was still young, our history was read as a process of overcoming, becoming a part of America, showing ourselves at our best.
There is no Pollyannaism in the celebrated texts of that era — slavery, murder and Jim Crow are well covered. But the Black historian Carter G. Woodson in his 1922 book “The Negro in Our History” sets out to explain “the history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro in this country” and “how the Negro has been influenced by contact with the Caucasian and to emphasize what the former has contributed to civilization.” A Black history whose main focus was grievance would not have occurred to him. You can tell from the chapter titles alone: “Self-Assertion,” “Blazing the Way,” “Achievements in Freedom,” “Health and Spirit” and “Toward Economic Efficiency.” White allies were similarly disinclined to engage Black history as a tirade. In 1936, the white historian Ina Corinne Brown, in “The Story of the American Negro,” introduced us to “interesting and significant human beings, neither better nor worse than other folk of like opportunities, that I have tried to present” in "these pages.”
Today, books like these would be regarded as quaint — or worse. The pride that the Black Power era instilled for many people was based in an oppositional stance. From the late 1960s on, it felt like the goal of the majority of Black studies was smoking out and decrying racism rather than exploring how to get past it.
The contrasts were stark. In 1957, the television documentary series “See It Now,” which portrayed the Black contralto Marian Anderson’s tour of Asia, included antagonistic questions she was asked about Gov. Orval Faubus, who was at the time preventing nine Black children from entering Central High in Little Rock, Ark. A viewer wrote the television station, complaining that the documentary had focused too much on that hateful incident rather than “the many of our race who are on top.” In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the classy television sitcom “Julia” depicted a middle-class Black nurse, played by Diahann Carroll, and her son. Ten years prior, Black critics would have adored it. But in the new era, Robert Lewis Shayon decried it for not depicting the many of his race who were on the bottom, calling the show “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.”
Under this new ideological imperative, the purpose of studying Black history was to utter an extended cry of weakness, to offer consolation rather than encouragement, and to trace present-day disparities to all but insuperable legacies. Mba Mbulu’s “Ten Lessons: An Introduction to Black History” treated Black history as a smudge of slavery and segregation, with chapter titles like “White People’s Attacks on Other People,” “Black People in White History” and “Back in Our Place.” John Hope Franklin’s foundational Black history text, “From Slavery to Freedom,” is informative in many ways, but steeped in the same sense that Black history is primarily about frustration and defeat at the hands of white people, such as tracing the development of troubled and violent inner cities, a hugely complex phenomenon, simply to white flight.
The literature professor Robert Chrisman and the scholar-activist Ernest Allen Jr. wrote that “racism continues as an ideology and a material force within the U.S., providing Blacks with no ladder that reaches the top.” The lawyer and activist Randall Robinson wrote that slavery “has hulled empty a whole race of people.” Where do you go from there? And why even bother trying?
From afar, the Black Smithsonian looks like a stepsibling of its better known and longer established neighbors. The National Museum of Natural History, with its august columns and stolid air, seems to have stood guard on the National Mall since time immemorial. The Air and Space Museum, a vast expanse of minimalist geometry, announces its ambitions with a gleaming bolt of stainless steel pointing brashly to the sky. The National Museum of African American History and Culture appears to be a less showy structure, compact and clad in something the color of reddish clay. Up close you see that it is in fact a delicate and intricate latticework. In the coolness of the lobby, light flows in and sightlines flow out, as if to welcome the world.
But what most struck me about the museum was its dazzling abundance. There is so much to see, hear and read that the museum would require multiple visits to fully take in, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Want to learn about Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress who was also an activist and memoirist? Or the gustatorial splendors of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans? Although he was a Harlem phenom in the 1910s and 1920s, did you happen to know who the radical orator and pamphleteer Hubert Harrison was? I have always wished Spike Lee would do a movie, with the cinematography in slightly faded Kodacolor to summon the era, dramatizing the National Black Political Convention of 1972 in Gary, Ind., and learning about it at the museum, you get an idea why.
None of this is divisive; it’s delicious. Having so very many artifacts, photographs and recordings gathered in one place brings the past to life more vibrantly than books alone could. The museum’s teachings are never strident or rhetorical. One example that struck me: an exhibition text that stated that starting in the 1950s, when Black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, white flight “often” ensued. Often, rather than always. That kind of nuance is all too rare in discussions of morally and emotionally charged issues. But in such situations, it’s all the more valuable.
When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my mother once or twice took me to the Black history museum there. This was the late ’70s, and at least in those days, the museum was a determinedly gloomy experience — to a grade schooler, at least, seemingly all slavery and snarling police dogs and despair. Nothing made me feel truly connected to the material. I wished instead that we were at the city’s Academy of Natural Sciences museum, or anywhere that was about wonder, creation, something more positive than just misery and name-checking the accomplishments of occasional isolated figures such as George Washington Carver. The Black Smithsonian would not have left junior me feeling that way. It would have inspired me, and awakened a new understanding of my people and their journey. I wish I could have experienced it way back then, but it was worth the wait.
Visitors to the museum can start on the basement level, shrouded in darkness as if we were in a slave ship’s hold. The sound system plays the lurchings of a heavily loaded wooden ship at sail, a sound the enslaved would have heard ceaselessly for months. We see preserved artifacts from slave ships, manacles that the slaves were bound by. One contemporary account describes how a slave ship’s deck was covered in blood and mucus, resembling something more like a battlefield. Pictures show how the people were packed in, stacked up, mired in their own filth. Absorbing it all was powerful in a way that no film I am aware of has gotten across — the despair, the stench, the sexual violation even during the passage, how many subjected to it jumped overboard, surely to drown or be devoured by sharks, rather than endure what was ahead.
As visitors move forward through history, we walk up gently sloped ramps into succeeding eras, then up further still, until we get to this century and we are up on the ground floor, standing in the daylight. This arrangement draws visitors into a participatory journey, a physicalized kind of argument, that our story is one of progress, rising, arising, emergence and blinking in the unfamiliar light. The journey is thrilling and it’s devastating, but most of all it is inspiring. We need more of that.
Ralph Ellison asked in 1944 if a people can “develop over 300 years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” It is true that Black people have been central in compelling America to stand up for its humanist ideals, as The 1619 Project teaches. But we cannot base our sense of self on an act of rebuke against someone else. Our importance is much greater.
A smart, educated Black woman once said to me, casually, “I think we’ll always be a sad people.” But why would any humans settle for sadness? We should acknowledge the tragedy, yes, but what we did well should be celebrated at least as loudly.
Exhibit A: the grand old Black business districts in American cities in the first half of the 20th century. We learn about the ones that were brutally burned down: Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. These are utterly gruesome stories that must be told, and the museum does so. But the vast majority of Black business districts, such as Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C., San Francisco’s Western Addition and the Black Belt in Los Angeles, did not suffer this fate. They were, in their time, victories.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. once described a feeling of awe while watching “Amos ’n’ Andy,” the early 1950s sitcom, when he was a kid. “What really captivated me was that in the all-Black world of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy,’” he wrote, “there was an all-Black department store, owned and operated by Black attendants for a Black clientele.” He had never experienced that world in real life, and certainly didn’t see it in most television shows. But it wasn’t just a story.
The Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago had several competing newspapers: The Bee occupied a lovely Art Deco building. The Defender taught Blacks to migrate north. There were many Black-owned banks. The Overton Hygienic building was a magnificent edifice and housed a cosmetics company, a life insurance company, a big bank and a drugstore. The neighborhood was home to no fewer than seven insurance companies and many hotels, including the gorgeous 200-room Hotel Brookmont. Provident was one of the top Black hospitals in the country, where Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery in 1893. Bronzeville was a Black paradise. You won’t find Bronzeville covered in Franklin’s “From Slavery to Freedom,” but it’s there in the Black Smithsonian.
Or think of the way that Blackness occupies the heart of the American musical sensibility. The harmonies of jazz and soul, the kind of rhythm we know as “jamming,” the gospel-inflected singing style that is now the cross-racial default — all of this is Black in origin. I attended a bat mitzvah recently, and much of the music was set to a funky beat no one in Sholem Aleichem stories would have known.
A serious Black history must accommodate these triumphs. It must allow for contradictions and moral complexity. We celebrate the end of segregation and the power of the civil rights era, and rightly so. But as with any sweeping historical change, not all the secondary and tertiary consequences were equally beneficial. Take those Black business districts. Once Black people had access to the vaster resources, wider variety and sometimes higher quality available in mainstream stores, they took their custom elsewhere. This — as opposed to white flight — is a big part of why these thriving Black alternate universes no longer exist.
Complexity is also relevant to how we process Booker T. Washington. In his “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895, he declared that white and Black people could live “separate as the fingers yet one as the hand.” Because that would ensure more segregation and disenfranchisement, he is typically depicted as being OK with racism. By contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois, an antiracist by today’s standard, decried racism and segregation while seeking to promote leadership by a “talented tenth” of Black people. Washington deserves better than that simplistic comparison. His vision for separate living was meant to be temporary; behind the scenes, he fought hard against racism. And his perhaps more cautious approach was shaped by having grown up in slavery, encountering bigotry and violence in a way that Du Bois never could, growing up in small-town Massachusetts. Washington was a much more progressive and interesting figure than one might think from reading many historians today, and very popular among Black people of all classes. You can hear it in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” “Du Bois? Who is dat?” a preacher asks. ”Man, he can’t be smart ez Booger T.!”
A serious Black history must also wrestle with the fact that African kingdoms played a central role in the slave trade. (I wish the museum had done more here.) They profited by selling war captives to the Europeans, who could never have satisfied their rapidly expanding market by simply snatching people one by one, the way we saw Kunta Kinte caught in “Roots.” The evil may not have been equally distributed, but it existed on both sides of the equation.
As for white people, no, the Black Smithsonian does not on the whole present them as anything like heroes. That doesn’t make the museum polarizing. Fairness does not require us to bury unpleasant memories or pretend that horrors never took place. Reasonable people can and should grapple with a past, present and future all at once.
The message of too much Black history has been a gloomy “Yes, we can’t.” It underestimates the human resilience that actual Black people have demonstrated so abundantly and so consistently over the 406 years of our presence on this continent. The question by which the Black Smithsonian should be judged is whether it represents the past in a way that helps us surmount the present and create the future. In showing us both the manacles that enslaved people were bound by during the Middle Passage and the nation within a nation that the Black community’s network of businesses, churches and lodges became, both the lynchings and the election — twice — of a Black president, the museum does a magnificent job. It is an example that other institutions should follow. It does not shy away from the tragedies, but neither does it give short shrift to the joy. It contains all of it, and trusts everyone to tolerate — no, celebrate — the contradictions.
Mr. Trump’s problem with the Black Smithsonian is rooted in an objection, legitimate in itself, to what has come to be called D.E.I. That acronym is too often a euphemism for a performatively institutionalized crusade against something called whiteness. What started as an academic critique grew into a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy that did nothing to improve the lives and opportunities of Black people — and a great deal to irritate and alienate white people.
The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”
Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.
A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.
So is the idea is that any teachings about Black history are a form of political agitation, “radical and wasteful,” as another executive order on D.E.I. has it. That our country openly addresses Black history in all of its facets is a badge of honor and sophistication, and the institution that Mr. Trump called out as harming our view of American history is an exemplar of all the field could be. The president and his minions should just walk on by. The rest of us should walk on in.
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7) Israel just launched its offensive to permanently ‘conquer’ Gaza as Trump’s Arab Gulf tour wraps up
Israel announced the initial phase of “Gideon’s chariots,” the expanded ground invasion to permanently “conquer” Gaza, amid reports that Trump reneged on his deal with Hamas to lift the blockade, and will reportedly expel 1 million Gazans to Libya.
BY Qassam Muaddi and Tareq S. Hajjaj, May 17, 2025
Smoke rises over residential buildings following an Israeli airstrike on the Tuffah neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City, May 9, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
Massive explosions shook the Gaza Strip in the first hours of Saturday morning as Israeli warplanes launched intensive airstrikes on north, south, and central Gaza, in what the Israeli army called “preparations to expand operations” in the Strip.
Israeli airstrikes hit Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, several parts of Gaza City, and Jabalia. A resident of the Shati’ refugee camp in Gaza City told Mondoweiss that “the occupation army had issued orders to evacuate Shati’ camp, but they called off the orders — and then they called for an evacuation again, keeping residents in constant anxiety.”
“Then, yesterday night, they began bombing all over Gaza, including Shati’ camp,” the Shati’ resident added. “It lasted all night.”
The airstrikes were accompanied by incursions of remote-controlled Israeli explosive vehicles in north Gaza, with local journalists reporting that the vehicle exploded in the Tal al-Zaatar neighborhood east of Jabalia between inhabited buildings. The pieces of shrapnel reached the Indonesian Hospital in the neighboring town of Beit Lahia, causing damage to the building, local journalists reported. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip have already killed 250 Palestinians in the past two days alone.
The renewed wave of bombings comes a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged last week to “enter Gaza with full force” in implementation of a new expanded ground offensive approved by the Israeli war cabinet nearly a month ago, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.”
The Israeli assault would see the army “conquer” Gaza and permanently occupy it, according to Israeli officials. Shortly before the invasion commenced on Saturday, the Israeli army dropped leaflets over Gaza, depicting a Biblical scene of the sea parting and engulfing destroyed buildings in the Strip, with a Star of David insignia in the corner below the words “righteous conquest.”
‘Is all this horror for us?’: North Gaza residents flee bombardment
According to Mahmoud Basal, the Civil Defense spokesperson in Gaza, the Israeli assault has resulted in the deaths of over 100 people in less than 12 hours. “It is a bloody and difficult day for the northern Gaza Strip,” he stated on Telegram. According to the Ministry of Health’s daily report, “153 martyrs and 459 injuries have arrived at hospitals in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours.” The Ministry clarified that the death toll had risen to 53,272 since the beginning of the war.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced families from eastern Gaza City, having evacuated their homes over a month ago due to the Israeli invasion of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, have crammed into the city’s western areas. They have established new displacement centers in Gaza City’s parks, stadiums, and universities, including the Yarmouk Stadium and the Islamic University.
During the past week, the Israeli army has threatened to evacuate these displacement centers as well, highlighting areas such as the Islamic University and other schools-turned-shelters as slated for evacuation.
On May 16, large numbers of people were displaced from areas in north Gaza, where the escalating ground invasion has intensified, prompting some residents to leave their homes for Gaza City.
Despite the Israeli army’s incursion into several areas in the central Gaza Strip and east of Khan Younis in the al-Qarara area, residents describe the situation in the north as the most dire.
Sulaiman Abu Sultan, 41, originally from Beit Lahia, says that the intensity of the bombardment in north Gaza forced him to leave his home. He tells Mondoweiss that the Israeli army is firing deadly missiles into crowded neighborhoods without warning or evacuation notice. “Deadly missiles are the warning,” Abu Sultan clarifies.
“The time for warnings through messages and phone calls is over. Now, they are killing hundreds to warn those who remain,” he adds. “They are sending deadly missiles that tear our bodies apart.”
Abu Sultan decided to take his family of five to Gaza City to stay with relatives in the Tal al-Hawa area, but he says that the situation there was not any better.
“We couldn’t bear it in Beit Lahia. The sounds were terrifying, and the bombing was random. The rubble was flying over our heads while we were in our destroyed homes,” Abu Sultan explains. “We thought Gaza City would be less terrifying, but we found the same situation: terrifying sounds and planes flying over us.”
“Is all this horror for us?” Abu Sultan muses. “It’s hard to believe that all this firepower in the sky is reserved for civilian families whose only concern is to save their children from bombardment and feed them so they don’t die of hunger.”
Israel plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza with active U.S. support
The all-out Israeli assault was preceded by over a week of intensified bombardment of the Strip following Hamas’s release of Israeli-American captive soldier Edan Alexander as a “goodwill gesture” to Donald Trump, who was due to arrive in the Middle East on his planned tour of Arab Gulf countries. The Israeli army heavily bombarded the European Hospital and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis throughout the week, allegedly targeting top Hamas leaders in a “command-and-control” complex underneath the European Hospital, even though Haaretz reported that Israel provided no evidence to back up its claims.
According to a Drop Site News interview with Hamas official Basem Naim, Alexander’s release was part of a deal Hamas struck with U.S. envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, who was supposed to compel Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza and let humanitarian aid into the Strip. Naim also said that Witkoff “personally committed” to ending the blockade and that Trump was supposed to publicly call for a ceasefire.
But according to the senior Hamas leader, the U.S. “threw the deal in the trash.”
Naim told Drop Site that there was “zero” progress in talks for a ceasefire, while Witkoff reportedly told Arab mediators that the U.S. would not be pressuring Israel to end the war on Gaza.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu appears as unmovable as ever, speaking to Israeli daily Maariv last week about how the Israeli army is “destroying more and more houses [in Gaza], and they [the Palestinians] have nowhere to return to,” adding that “the logical result will be the desire of Gaza residents to leave.” Netanyahu also remarked that half of Gazans already want to leave, and that “the difficulty is in finding countries that would accept to receive them.”
As part of Israel’s plan to occupy Gaza indefinitely, Israel intends to handle the distribution of aid to the civilian population in a dystopian new plan that would see the vetting of families eligible for aid with the participation of U.S. military contractors. The plan would reportedly have Gazans corralled in a concentration camp in what remains of Rafah, which has been flattened and cleared by the Israeli army, and Israel would later gradually expel Gaza’s population from the Strip under the rubric of so-called “voluntary migration.” In essence, this would entail the flattening and extermination of the rest of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of its population.
In line with this Israeli plan, NBC reported on Friday that the Trump administration was working on a plan to permanently relocate one million Palestinians to Libya in exchange for lifting sanctions imposed on the Arab country over a decade ago. NBC spoke to five unnamed sources “with knowledge of the effort.”
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 1 million children in Gaza are at risk of starvation, including 70,000 facing “serious degrees of malnutrition” due to the blockade. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the UN-affiliated famine monitoring body, 96 percent of Gazans face “high levels of acute food insecurity,” with 22 percent facing “catastrophic levels.”
Moreover, the Health Ministry announced that the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza has exceeded 52,000 dead, in addition to at least 10,000 people missing under the rubble.
Those who survived so far now brace for the next episode of the U.S.-backed Israeli genocidal assault.
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8) Amid Cease-Fire Talks, Israel Says It Has Expanded Ground Operations in Gaza
Israel aims to press Hamas into releasing hostages and ultimately to destroy the group, but says it will now also allow some aid to enter the enclave.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 18, 2025
The Israeli military announced on Sunday that its forces had begun “extensive ground operations” throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip, advancing its plan to move farther into the enclave and seize more land in an intensified campaign aimed at pressuring Hamas amid negotiations for a cease-fire.
At the same time, the Israeli government said it would allow “a basic quantity of food” to enter Gaza. The announcement comes 11 weeks after it halted the entry of all goods and humanitarian assistance in an attempt to force Hamas into accepting a temporary extension of an earlier cease-fire deal that had expired.
President Trump has been clear about the need to avert a looming famine in Gaza and some Israeli military officials had privately concluded that Palestinians there faced widespread starvation unless aid deliveries were restored soon.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office explained the abrupt reversal in Israeli policy as an “operational need to enable the expansion of the military operation to defeat Hamas,” adding in a statement that the military had recommended the step.
The statement did not say exactly when the resumption of aid would begin, or how or where it would be distributed. Plans for a new American-backed system for distributing aid meant to bypass Hamas have not yet been put into action.
Details about the renewed offensive were also scarce, and it was not immediately clear how far the Israeli forces would go at this stage, or which areas of Gaza would be most affected.
As of Sunday night, troops had not yet reached the center of major cities like Gaza City and Khan Younis as they did at the height of the initial ground offensive in the fall of 2023 and early 2024. There are also fewer forces in Gaza now than there have been at other times, according to experts, though the military said on Sunday that five army divisions were involved in the offensive, amounting to tens of thousands of soldiers.
Israeli government and military officials have vowed to press ahead with this new stage in the 19-month war until Hamas releases the hostages it is still holding or until the group has been destroyed or forced to surrender.
Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza in recent days to prepare the way for the expansion of ground operations, the military said, adding that the wave of strikes had hit what it described as more than 670 “Hamas terror targets.”
So far, the military said, it has killed “dozens” of Hamas operatives and has destroyed military infrastructure used by the group both above and below ground. But many civilians, including children, have also been killed, according to Palestinian officials and residents of Gaza.
The expansion of military operations comes even as Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks for a cease-fire in Doha, the capital of Qatar.
The military has been issuing threats for days about a broader invasion, without much change visible on the ground. Israeli officials have said that the new campaign would be carried out gradually, in stages, and could be stopped should a deal be reached with Hamas.
The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, said on Sunday that the idea was to dissect Gaza into separate areas. He said that the population would be told to evacuate areas where the military was operating, and that the military was being intentionally ambiguous about its movements to protect its forces.
More than 53,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the war, according to health officials in the enclave, whose death tolls do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The health ministry in Gaza said on Sunday that the preliminary number of those killed since dawn stood at more than 90.
Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, near the southern city of Khan Younis, said residents were living through near-constant bombardment over the past few days, rattling her home with terrifying blasts.
But she said she was even more afraid that a renewed ground invasion could again force her to flee her house — where her family still had some electricity from solar panels, as well as a modest stockpile of rice and flour — for sweltering tent camps near the coast.
“So many have died for nothing,” Ms. Abu Daqqa said. “People want the war to end by all means.”
International efforts have so far failed to broker an end to the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed about 1,200 people, and the Palestinian assailants took about 250 hostages back to Gaza.
At least 21 living hostages are still being held, according to the Israeli government, along with the remains of more than 30 others who have died in captivity.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel signaled for the first time on Sunday that his negotiating team in Qatar was authorized to discuss terms for a broad deal that could end the war in Gaza.
Previously, the Israeli prime minister’s office had said that the negotiations would be limited to discussing an initial deal in which Hamas would release about 10 of the living hostages and the two sides would enter a cease-fire lasting about six weeks.
But even as he spoke of the possibility of a broader deal on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu reiterated his firm conditions for ending the war: the release of all the hostages, the expulsion from Gaza of Hamas leaders and fighters and the demilitarization of the Palestinian coastal enclave. Hamas has steadfastly rejected the idea of disarming.
Omer Dostri, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said his statement represented “nothing new and no drama” since Hamas was not ready at this point to surrender.
A Hamas official said over the weekend that Israel had withdrawn its insistence that truce talks be based on the earlier proposal for an initial deal and that everything was now up for negotiation.
It was not clear if Mr. Netanyahu’s statement was meant to lay the ground for an unexpected diplomatic move or was chiefly aimed at deflecting domestic criticism that he had not done enough to bring back the hostages.
Analysts noted that Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas also faced pressure from the Trump administration, and that Israel’s military pressure on Hamas might be working.
Kobi Michael, an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said all of the above could be true at the same time.
“A significant military dynamic has been created,” Mr. Michael said, adding that the killing of many Hamas operatives had brought the group back to the negotiating table.
Aaron Boxerman and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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9) The Website Where Lawyers Mock ‘Yellow-Bellied’ Firms Bowing to Trump
Above the Law, a legal industry website with a long history of skewering the nation’s most elite firms, has found a moment and plenty of inside tipsters.
By Elizabeth Williamson, Reporting from Washington and New York, Published May 18, 2025, Updated May 19, 2025
David Lat, right, founded Above the Law in 2006. Joe Patrice, left, is one of the site’s four full-time writers; all are lawyers. Credit...OK McCausland for The New York Times
The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion.
That would be offering leaks to Above the Law, a pugnacious legal industry website best known for scoops about law firm annual bonuses, snarky coverage of legal news and salacious stories of barristers behaving badly. But since March, when Mr. Trump began targeting for retribution top law firms whose clients and past work he does not like, Above the Law has become a rage read for lawyers incensed at the firms that accommodated him.
Fueled by a stream of inside-the-conference-room exclusives, Above the Law delivers a daily public spanking to what it calls “The Yellow-Bellied Nine.” Those are the elite firms who pledged a collective $1 billion in free legal work to Mr. Trump after he signed executive orders threatening to bar their lawyers from federal buildings, suspend their security clearances and cancel their government contracts.
In the words of Above the Law, the firms “folded like a damp cocktail napkin” to the president’s demands for “pro bono payola.”
“For demoralized people stuck inside these firms, I think this is catharsis,” said Kevin Carroll, a Washington lawyer who once worked at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. (Quinn Emanuel has not been threatened by Mr. Trump, although its comanaging partner, William A. Burck, was fired as an outside ethics counsel for the Trump Organization by Mr. Trump’s sons in April. Mr. Burck’s offense was signing up to also represent Harvard, one of Mr. Trump’s prime targets in his crackdown on the nation’s top colleges.)
For Mr. Carroll, the site’s skewering of mostly left-leaning legal titans stirs schadenfreude.
“I’ve always wondered,” he said, “when pressed, would rich liberal lawyers choose to stay rich or liberal? Now we know.”
A few recent headlines from the site:
“Money v. Morals: Which Will Law Students Choose When It Comes to Job Offers From Biglaw Firms That Made Deals With Trump?”
“Biglaw’s Cowards Play Dumb About Pro-Bono Payola”
“This Law Firm Had to Delete A LOT to Purge Its Diversity and Pro Bono Work”
“Biglaw Firms in League With Donald Trump Now Have to Defend Cops That Kill Black and Brown People”
Unlike most other legal industry outlets, access to Above the Law is free for anyone who supplies an email address and basic job information for use by its advertisers, who pay the bills. The site urges readers to “send us your leads, gossip, leaked documents, embarrassing photos or anything else juicy.”
Partners running billion-dollar firms have long eyed its morning newsletter like an elephant does a mouse. One partner at a top-tier firm told The New York Times that lawyers there have a rule: “Don’t do anything that could wind up in Above the Law.” The partner requested anonymity for fear of violating the rule.
“One of the comments I most appreciated,” said David Lat, the lawyer hired by the site’s creators, Breaking Media, as its founding editor in 2006, “was from an administrative assistant who told me, ‘The partners are nicer to us because they don’t want to show up on the site as ‘The Screamer.’”
Mr. Lat is the author of the now-defunct but once widely read blog among the federal judiciary, the dishy Underneath Their Robes, which featured critiques of “superhottie” judges and courtroom celebrity sightings. Mr. Lat left Above the Law in 2019 and remains a minor investor in Breaking Media.
The law firms have defended their deals with Mr. Trump by arguing that they simply committed to representing clients no matter their political beliefs and doing pro bono legal work on causes like helping veterans and fighting antisemitism. The site occasionally points out, however, that Mr. Trump has since suggested that the firms might be drafted into negotiating his trade deals, or defending police accused of misconduct.
Joe Patrice, one of Above the Law’s four full-time writers (all are lawyers) said that every so often, someone pings the tipster line with a demand that the site be “nicer, more bipartisan” in covering the current crisis. Mr. Patrice acknowledged that this gives him pause.
“When squeaky wheels are all you ever hear from, you wonder, are we being unfair?” he said.
To answer his own question, he wrote an article exploring whether that might be the case. He began by researching how Mr. Trump had been “bench-slapped” — a favorite term at Above the Law — by some of conservatism’s most prominent judges.
Among them is J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, who said last month on MSNBC that Mr. Trump had “declared war on the federal judiciary, on the rule of law and on the nation’s legal profession.” Paul Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush and once on Mr. Trump’s short list for a Supreme Court appointment, sued the administration on behalf of WilmerHale, and won a restraining order from a Republican-appointed judge.
“The real intellectual leaders of the conservative legal movement are more incensed than we are,” Mr. Patrice concluded.
None of the nine firms that accommodated Mr. Trump responded to requests for comment. Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’s longtime chairman, previously said in an email to colleagues that the firm’s agreement “will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values.”
While a few lawyers interviewed by The Times found Above the Law a bit lowbrow, or “more interesting for associates than partners,” none were allowed by their firms to say so on the record, because, as one said, “I guess it might antagonize them or something.”
The outlet has scooped heftier competitors on stories, such as one on a summer associate at a New York firm who stripped down and dove into the Hudson during a charity gala. On the weightier side, there were the former editor Elie Mystal’s articles flagging allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh before his Supreme Court confirmation battle.
Even before Mr. Trump began issuing executive orders, Above the Law’s tipsters flagged firms that were quietly stripping pronouns from email signatures and halting diversity initiatives in hope of escaping the president’s wrath. Above the Law covered discontent at the firm A&O Shearman before it reached a deal with Mr. Trump, and chronicled leaked tales of internal revolt at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom after it became one of the first firms to accommodate Mr. Trump.
Above the Law also posted emails exposing Skadden’s efforts to disable mass distribution lists on its internal email system to, as the outlet put it, “head off anyone who might want to express their opinion about the firm becoming a cowardly laughingstock.”
Another tipster offered news of Skadden’s search for a public relations specialist, which Above the Law posted under the Onion-esque headline “Skadden Posts Dream Job for Anyone Who Hates Themselves.”
Above the Law is based in the garret-like top floor of the Cable Building, at the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan. One recent rainy afternoon, the same day several more firms neared agreements with Mr. Trump, Kathryn Rubino, a writer and editor, was updating the “Biglaw Spine Index.” The index charts the nation’s top 200 law firms and, as the site says, “what they’re doing — or not — in the face of Trump’s attack.”
Firms that cut a deal with Mr. Trump are highlighted in red and include Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Skadden; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Milbank; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; A&O Shearman; and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Sullivan & Cromwell, which helped broker the Paul Weiss deal with Mr. Trump, is also in red.
Those that sued the White House are in green and include WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey and Jenner & Block. More than a dozen firms representing or supporting them in court are also in green. The rest of the top 200 firms were deemed as remaining silent and highlighted in yellow.
Despite its outlets’ humble quarters, Breaking Media is backed by well-heeled investors, including Justin Smith, a co-founder of the news website Semafor, and S. Carter Burden III, son of the late New York councilman, media magnate and philanthropist.
Coverage of the law firms’ capitulation has increased traffic to the site, which draws about 1.5 million readers in a normal month, said John Lerner, Breaking Media’s chief executive, who declined to say exactly how big that spike is. “It’s clear that a lot of lawyers want to push back against these executive orders,” he said.
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10) What Is the Future of George Floyd Square?
When you see the weathered statues of raised fists, you’ll know you’re there.
The corner where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd nearly five years ago is to this day a protest site and a memorial.
But how it will live in history remains unsettled.
By Ernesto Londoño Photographs and Video by Joshua Rashaad McFadden, May 18, 2025
"Last year, at least 1,260 people were killed by police officers in the United States, more than in any other year in the past decade."
The intersection of 38th Street East and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis was forever altered the day a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck five years ago, killing him.
The killing led to a national reckoning over police misconduct and racism, and here, it spawned a site of protest, art, grief and remembrance that feels to some in this community like an open wound.
Wooden sculptures in the shape of raised brown fists mark either end of the street. Arresting murals nearby have been defaced and touched up repeatedly.
Residents and city officials have debated for years what should be done with the site, and how the man whose killing fueled the Black Lives Matter movement should be memorialized.
The space’s unresolved state in many ways reflects how stuck the country remains on matters of race, justice and reparations.
On this there is little debate: George Floyd Square gave rise to a movement that changed the United States. But what will its legacy and future be?
The sidewalk where Mr. Floyd took his final breath after repeatedly protesting, “I can’t breathe,” has become a pilgrimage site with an ever-shifting memorial. It is packed with bleached stuffed animals, old T-shirts, photos, flowers, rosaries and other totems people dropping by to pay their respects have left behind over the years.
In the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder, residents barricaded the streets leading to 38th and Chicago. Neighbors brought food to share. People provided first aid to those injured in demonstrations. And civilians set up checkpoints on the streets leading to the crossroads.
“You knew that something special was taking place,” said Jeanelle Austin, a longtime resident who became a caretaker of the memorial. “It became a home base for the protests during the uprising, and people in the middle of the night were holding circles for healing.”
The city has tried to turn the page on George Floyd Square as a rough-hewn protest site by putting forward a plan to revamp the streets and sidewalks and setting aside the lot of a shuttered gas station to build a memorial or community center.
But residents are divided over whether the intersection should become a pedestrian plaza or remain open to traffic.
Ms. Austin, for one, does not want to see the fists come down or the makeshift shrine replaced by something more polished.
“People have been more focused on aesthetics than becoming,” she said. “The reason this place is still disrupted is because we haven’t become who we need to be. If we can get to where we are a nation where we are not taking lives for the sake of taking lives, then we can start talking about aesthetics.”
Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who prosecuted Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd, said this place for him was hallowed ground.
Mr. Ellison, the first Black person elected to statewide office in Minnesota, confronts conflicting feelings here — hope about the power of protest vies with deep grief and alarm.
Last year, at least 1,260 people were killed by police officers in the United States, more than in any other year in the past decade. In an executive order signed last month, President Trump laid out his administration’s plans to “aggressively police communities,” including by rethinking the Department of Justice’s recent agreements with Minneapolis and other cities aimed at reining in abusive and discriminatory policing.
“Five years after the death of George Floyd, we may be in a state of backlash,” Mr. Ellison said. “The federal government has abandoned the idea of trying to improve police-and-community relations — they’ve abandoned the idea of making sure people feel equal before the law and are treated equally before the law.”
After Mr. Floyd’s death, the Department of Justice and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released two damning reports. Minneapolis agreed to substantial changes to its police department, including steps to rein in the use of force, bolster training and address discriminatory practices.
But elected officials remain stuck on what to do about George Floyd Square. In February, the Minneapolis City Council rejected a proposal the mayor’s office put forward after spending more than $2 million on an extensive community-consultation process. The plan envisioned broader sidewalks, more trees and a reinvigorated business district.
“This should be a sacred place for understanding the racial injustices that have been perpetrated for hundreds of years,” said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. “And it should also be a place where you can get a sandwich and a cup of coffee, a place that adds value to the surrounding neighborhood.”
Mr. Frey, who is seeking a third term, said the city’s vision for George Floyd Square reflected the wishes of a large portion of residents and business owners in the area.
“It’s time to move forward,” he said. “There’s a difference between moving forward and moving on.”
Nearby, the “Say Their Names” cemetery began as an art installation honoring Black people killed by the police. Five years later, it still stands.
Long before Mr. Floyd’s death, revitalizing this area had preoccupied Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins, whose district includes part of George Floyd Square.
Once a bustling commercial district home to many Black families, the area fell on hard times after the construction of an interstate highway in the 1960s displaced thousands of residents. Here as in cities across the country, this process led to school closures, struggling businesses and crime.
“Many times when I come here I think about Black power and the agency to claim space,” said Ms. Jenkins. “And then, I also think about, Why can’t we make this space more formally beautiful? Because Black people deserve beauty.”
Ms. Jenkins said the pain from Mr. Floyd’s murder continued to have a paralyzing effect. But it’s time for decisive action to build a permanent memorial, improve the area’s infrastructure and attract new businesses, she argued.
“I think the majority of people want free-flowing traffic, they want economic development, they want resources to be committed,” she said.
The gas station across the street — a parcel the city purchased for a yet-to-be-defined purpose — remains abandoned, boarded up, covered in graffiti brimming with indignation, grief and resolve.
Councilman Jason Chavez, whose district includes the sidewalk where Mr. Floyd died, was among those who voted to reject the city’s plan for the square.
The councilman said he, too, wanted to see greater investment and development in the area, but worried that the plan sought to turn the page on the killing, reducing it to a moment in history.
“This city has to reckon with its past and the current racial harm it has caused,” said Mr. Chavez.
The concept Mr. Chavez and allied council members favored included a pedestrian mall closed to traffic. But too often, he said, the conversation about the future of George Floyd Square seems like a debate about zoning and infrastructure — rather than one about justice, reparations and remembrance.
“There’s an opportunity to preserve the area here and make it better for the future without forgetting what happened,” he said.
Angela Harrelson, George Floyd’s aunt, feels more solace than grief these days in George Floyd Square.
Reflecting on the past five years, she is strikingly optimistic. The Trump administration has demonized the diversity and equity initiatives that flourished after Mr. Floyd’s killing, and vowed to “unleash” police officers the president contends were muzzled by liberals. But the legacy of her nephew’s brutal killing remains undimmed, Ms. Harrelson said.
“After he was killed, there was this awareness that I’ve never seen before,” she said. “There was a validation that, Hey, this is not in our heads, that the police are killing Black people. It’s real. It wasn’t like that before. It was more like almost a taboo to talk about racism.”
The reasons for Ms. Harrelson’s hope are reflected in a jarring encounter she once had at the memorial. She had seen an older white man bawling at the intersection, and approached to console him.
Through tears, she recalled, the man told her he had long been a white supremacist, a proud racist. But seeing the video of Mr. Floyd’s murder shattered something within him, eliciting deep shame.
He asked Ms. Harrelson for forgiveness and moved toward her.
“I don’t know why God allowed me to be receptive,” she said. “He hugged me, embraced me. When he walked away, it made me realize that that man needed healing more than I did.”
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11) Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point.
A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity.
By Andrew Keh, May 18, 2025
Thomas J Price’s sculpture, “Grounded in the Stars,” was installed temporarily in Times Square last month. Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
The bronze sculpture is intentionally unassuming, depicting an anonymous Black woman, casually dressed, with a neutral expression on her face and her hands on her hips.
But as soon as the 12-foot statue was erected last month in Times Square, it touched off a roiling debate — one that reflects both a long-simmering argument over public monuments, and a very 2025 political dispute about diversity and race in America.
A columnist for Fox News wondered why a statue of an “angry Black lady” had been displayed in the same city where a contentious monument of Theodore Roosevelt had been removed a few years back, while a writer for The Federalist described the work as “leftist cultural warfare.”
“This is what they want us to aspire to be?” Jesse Watters, the Fox News host, recently asked on his show. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He added, “It’s a D.E.I. statue.”
As the conversation has intensified, criticism has emerged from several angles: from those seeking to preserve the country’s historical monuments; from people wondering if the piece employed stereotypical imagery; from critics calling its message and execution ham fisted. But social media has been overrun with commenters, often anonymous, hurling overt racism and sexism.
To the artist and the organizers of the public exhibition, the backlash — however unsavory — effectively justifies the sculpture’s existence at a time when the Trump administration and its allies are targeting all manner of things involving nonwhite people as “D.E.I.”
The piece, “Grounded in the Stars,” was produced in 2023 by Thomas J Price, a London-based sculptor whose work in recent years has directly critiqued the traditions of public monuments and portraiture.
The statue was installed on April 29 by the Times Square Alliance, which periodically invites contemporary artists to exhibit work in the bustling plaza. The piece will remain there through June 17.
A placard displayed alongside the piece declares its intent: The work challenges the conventional wisdom of “who should be immortalized through monuments.” The text points out, too, how the sculpture presents a contrast to the two permanent monuments — “both white, both men” — that stand nearby.
“What has ensued is a fairly impressive amount of debate and exchange and critical dialogue,” said Jean Cooney, the director of the Time Square Alliance’s arts program, “the kind you hope a public artwork will provoke.”
It was a timely provocation. While debates about monuments have bubbled up across the United States essentially since the country’s inception, they have intensified over the past several years amid reinvigorated movements for racial justice and the backlashes to those efforts.
Patricia Eunji Kim, an art historian at New York University, said that monuments inspired widespread emotional investment because they posed questions about how to spend public money, how to shape public spaces and how to project a collective heritage.
“I understand why there is such a backlash, because the stakes are so high in that sense,” Ms. Kim said.
But critics of “Grounded in the Stars” may not have noticed that the piece is not actually a monument, at least not in the conventional sense.
It was first exhibited two years ago in Los Angeles at Hauser & Wirth, an international gallery that is currently hosting an exhibition of related works from Mr. Price at one of its New York locations. The sculptures, according to a release from the gallery, “amplify traditionally marginalized bodies and redress structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we choose to celebrate in art.”
With its dark bronze material, towering height and contrapposto figure, the sculpture has read to some as a traditional monument, when it is in fact an artwork about monuments.
“Are there no notable Black women who actually exist to celebrate?” wrote David Marcus, a columnist for Fox News. “How about a giant Condoleezza Rice, or a somewhat more diminutive Simone Biles?”
The hubbub around the statue, for some, also reflected the changing tenor of social discourse in the second term of President Trump.
The term D.E.I. (a reference to the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of recent years) has become a political lighting rod under Mr. Trump, and the administration’s efforts to eradicate the concept have taken on bizarre forms, such as the temporary deletion of Jackie Robinson’s biography from a Department of Defense website.
Others saw the blast of racism that greeted the sculpture online as further evidence of an increasingly coarsened climate. Last month, a white woman in Minnesota garnered a groundswell of public support, and amassed almost a million dollars in donations, after directing a racial slur at a Black child on a playground.
On platforms like X, comments about Mr. Price’s work have included A.I.-generated racist caricatures of Black women, vicious stereotypes and crude derision.
“We live in a political climate right now where out-loud racism is now excused left and right, in addition to insidious systemic racism, and people feel emboldened to say racist things all the time,” said TK Smith, a curator and cultural historian based in Atlanta.
Evidence of this evolution, for some, has existed right in Times Square.
Just six years ago, the Times Square Alliance temporarily installed a similarly monumental statue by the artist Kehinde Wiley, who rose to stardom for his aristocratic portraits of contemporary Black people. The work, “Rumors of War,” depicted a Black man in a sweatshirt and jeans heroically astride a horse, in the style of a Confederate monument.
“I don’t recall a single negative piece about that artwork,” said Ms. Cooney, who organized that exhibition as well.
But such art is always at risk of being misconstrued. Michele Bogart, a historian of public art in New York City, said a person encountering an artwork in a gallery was often privy to its intent — and likely open to learning more.
“But when its placed in Times Square, nobody is obligated to try to understand,” she said.
Ms. Bogart also bemoaned what she perceived as the disappearance of arts education and a general oversimplification of ideas about representation among the general public as contributing to the toxic tone of this discourse.
“People are not attuned to aesthetics,” she said.
Vocal online critics of the sculpture have also included Black people, who have knocked Mr. Price for presenting what they see as a disrespectful image of Black women, or for leaning into stereotypes about them.
But Elma Blint, a jewelry designer from Brooklyn, who visited the work on Friday, offered an opposing view, saying the figure looked “like every Black woman in my family” and suggesting its detractors were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black woman taking up space.
Mr. Price, who declined to comment for this article, addressed this debate by posting a comic strip to his Instagram account. The first panel shows two Black women gazing up at the sculpture.
“I love this,” one says.
“Wow, I hate this,” the other responds.
In a 2020 essay for Time magazine, Mr. Price wrote that his work aimed to show “that if you’re a Black person being represented in sculpture, you don’t have to be an athlete, or strike a pose, or fulfill an expectation.”
Within the art world, this kind of conceptualization might risk being discounted as an almost banal insight, and some in the industry have viewed the broad palatability of Mr. Price’s work as a factor in his commercial success.
But out on the street, as the discourse has shown, his point is not so smoothly digested.
“He definitely struck a vein,” Mr. Smith said. “We are dealing with wounds that are not healed. And we can’t heal them if they’re not spoken about.”
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12) A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret
Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured from the public, even his family, as he advised presidents and devoted his life to undoing the danger he created.
By William J. Broad, May 19, 2025
William J. Broad interviewed Richard L. Garwin in January for the last time after speaking with him many times over decades for articles on nuclear weapons, nonproliferation and other subjects.
Richard L. Garwin, second right, with, from left, Peter A. Clausen, a disarmament expert, and the physicists Hans Bethe and Kurt Gottfried, during a news conference on missile defense hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1984. James J. MacKenzie
Enrico Fermi’s battle with cancer was nearing its end in late 1954 when he received a visitor.
Fermi, a Nobel laureate in physics, had fled fascism in Europe and become a founder of the nuclear age, helping bring the world’s first reactor and first atom bomb to life.
The visitor, Richard L. Garwin, had been Fermi’s student at the University of Chicago, the laureate calling him “the only true genius I have ever met.” Now, he had done something known at the time only by Fermi and a handful of other experts. Not even his family knew. Three years earlier, the boy wonder, then 23, had designed the world’s first hydrogen bomb, which brought the fury of the stars to Earth.
In a test, it had exploded with a force nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, its power greater than all the explosives used in World War II.
To his reverential student, Fermi confided a regret. He felt his life had involved too little participation in crucial issues of public policy. He died a few weeks later at 53.
fter that visit, Dr. Garwin set out on a new path, seeing nuclear scientists as having a responsibility to speak out. His resolve, he later told a historian, came from a desire to honor the memory of the scientist he had known best and admired most.
“I modeled myself to whatever extent I could after Fermi,” he said.
Dr. Garwin, the designer of the world’s deadliest weapon, died last Tuesday at age 97, leaving behind a legacy of nuclear horrors he devoted his life to countering. But he also left a strange puzzle.
Why for a half-century did he hide what Fermi and a dozen presidents knew? It was a topic I discussed with him this January in an interview, the last of many.
The riddle is especially odd because his central role in creating the H-bomb became the motivating force that drove him forward, that helped him turn Fermi’s regrets into a life of political and social activism, that made him an inconspicuous giant of nuclear arms control.
“If I could wave a wand” to make the H-bomb vanish, he once told me, “I would.”
In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin’s superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.
That bomb wasn’t the only feat driven by Dr. Garwin’s prodigious intellect. He made basic discoveries about the structure of the universe, laid the groundwork for wonders of health care and computers, and won many awards. He pushed back frontiers in astronomy, physics, superconductors, orbital reconnaissance and a multitude of other topics he investigated, often at the U.S. government’s behest.
But what drove him, what made him eager to advise presidents, was not his gift for coming up with marvels of discovery and innovation but, courtesy of Fermi, a personal crusade to save the world from his own creation.
Henry A. Kissinger advised at least 12 American presidents in some capacity. Dr. Garwin never officially joined any president’s cabinet, as Kissinger had. But in our last interview, the physicist looked over a list of presidents and one by one identified the commanders-in-chief he had counseled. There were 13.
While eager to counter his brainchild, Dr. Garwin took no personal or moral responsibility for bringing the H-bomb into existence. Its birth, he argued, was inevitable.
“Maybe I sped up its development by a year or two,” he said in 2021. “That’s all.” Historians of the age tend to agree. The Soviet Union quickly followed his pioneering lead, then a half-dozen other nations. Today, hydrogen bombs have replaced atom bombs in most arsenals, creating a world of uneasy standoffs among nuclear foes.
By all accounts, Dr. Garwin believed that he — and sometimes he alone — could peer into the chaos of the universe and discern its underlying order. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who during World War II led the making of the first atomic bomb, he could also be cruel and intolerant of those he saw as less gifted.
Even so, Dr. Garwin showed a knack for teamwork and generosity with peers he respected. Over decades, the physicist worked hard to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted. He supported the construction of costly detectors, which, in 2015, successfully observed the ripples, opening a new window on the universe. Dr. Garwin beamed with pride when the finding won a Nobel Prize.
So too, Dr. Garwin managed to walk a tricky path through the nation’s military-industrial complex, which crushed Oppenheimer and coddled Edward Teller, an early proponent of hydrogen bomb research. For decades, he criticized the complex from within, promoting some ideas and undermining others, using his intellect and standing as a knowledgeable insider to shake things up — often anonymously.
“The most influential scientist you’ve never heard of” is how his biographer cast him. The physicist told newcomers to the federal apparatus that they could get something done or get credit, but not both. He was, in some respects, the antithesis of Kissinger, who carefully tended his public image.
The left loved Dr. Garwin’s attacks on the American military establishment, but his own compass seemed to align less with politics than pragmatism. He received awards from President George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
“He’s never met a problem he didn’t want to solve,” Mr. Obama said in 2016 when he presented Dr. Garwin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The two-term president described the physicist as advising White House occupants “rather bluntly.”
Overall, Dr. Garwin’s life can be seen as a tale of genius in which key manifestations were obscured by a wall of silence. Why, for instance, did he wait so long to tell his family about his H-bomb role? Was he trying to protect his loved ones from criticism and hateful bluster?
No. It turned out that, as can happen in lives of government service, he felt that sensitive issues of national security loomed over him.
In our last interview, Dr. Garwin said he worried that talkative family members might inadvertently bring him to the attention of foreign intelligence agencies eager to learn H-bomb secrets. That concern, he added, haunted him even after his role became known publicly.
“I still worry about that,” he said at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., on a cloudy winter day. He glanced out the window.
“They could be listening now.”
ADVISING THE ADVISERS
The Birth of the Hydrogen Bomb
Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928. His father taught electronics at a technical high school.
As a child, Richard, called Dick, impressed adults with his language and math abilities. He loved to take apart and reassemble things, including a vacuum cleaner.
Despite his obvious talents and his early entry into high school, an English teacher there told his parents that Dick would never get into college. He defied that prediction, studying physics at the Case School of Applied Science, in Cleveland. The teen lived at home, took the bus to school and worked nights.
He graduated at 19 and Standard Oil offered him a full ride for graduate study at the University of Chicago, which had one of the nation’s top physics departments.
Fermi became the young man’s adviser. Two years later, in 1949, Dr. Garwin graduated from Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor at the school.
The 21-year-old had been too young to play a role in the Manhattan Project, but now found himself deeply involved in what followed.
Like many Americans, Dr. Garwin grew concerned when Moscow that summer detonated its first atom bomb. How would Washington respond? In early 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced that the nation would seek to make “the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”
Fermi invited Dr. Garwin to join him at Los Alamos, the base set amid the tall pines and deep canyons of New Mexico’s backcountry where Oppenheimer’s bomb was born. Now on the agenda for the sprawling lab: trying to make good on Truman’s threat.
Deep inside every star, extraordinarily high heats and pressures fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing bursts of energy. The Los Alamos idea was to mimic that fusion process. The experts called it thermonuclear — in part to distinguish its high-temperature reactions from those of atomic bombs, which start at room temperature.
The general plan was that an exploding atom bomb would act as a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. The question was how. Early ideas had atomic and hydrogen fuels layered in alternating bands, similar to the insides of a baseball.
The breakthrough came in early 1951. Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, a Los Alamos colleague, envisioned two distinct stages set next to each other inside a cylindrical casing.
Moving at the speed of light, radiation from the exploding atom bomb would hit the casing’s inner wall and, in a rebound, flood the interior with a colossal burst of rays that would compress and ignite the hydrogen fuel.
The new idea gave the bomb unlimited power. Because the hydrogen fuel was separate from the initial mayhem of atomic debris and shock waves, it could, in theory, be infinitely large.
Teller asked Dr. Garwin to draw up a detailed plan. He warned that it would have to address “every conceivable doubt” of top scientists. “Garwin’s paper was criticized up and down,” Teller wrote in his memoirs, but the young man’s plan “remained unchanged.”
The prodigy turned the rough idea into a four-page plan that’s still classified top secret. He attached a large schematic diagram.
On a coral atoll in the Western Pacific, the device grew slowly. Dr. Garwin never visited the test site where his finished creation stood two stories high and weighed 82 tons.
The test blast, code-named Ivy Mike, took place on Nov. 1, 1952. It vaporized a Pacific isle and produced a mushroom cloud 100 miles wide.
Dr. Garwin, then 24, kept his head down. No news accounts cited his name. No one condemned or praised him. He was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago, not a high government official or a scientific celebrity.
A month after the blast, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, which allowed him to hold a physics post at Columbia University. In the decades to come, he was granted 47 patents for his IBM work.
The unusual arrangement also gave him the freedom to repeatedly change the course of history. Dr. Garwin did so mainly by offering scientific counsel to presidents and their advisers — a continuum of White House consulting that ran from Eisenhower to Trump.
ADVISING KENNEDY
The Abolition of an H-bomb Threat
President John F. Kennedy used the nation’s scientific and military feats to spook Moscow and showcase the West’s technological edge. It was his top Cold War strategy.
Then disaster struck.
In a case of bad things having good outcomes, the repercussions of the disaster helped give birth to the first successful instance of nuclear arms control.
The crisis began on July 9, 1962, when the American military, seeking ways to destroy incoming Soviet warheads, detonated an H-bomb some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The record height for a thermonuclear blast produced surprises both on the ground and in space. Streetlights in Hawaii went out. Satellites in orbit failed.
It turned out the blast had pumped up the radiation belts around Earth, making the doughnut-like rings of energetic particles more dangerous. The military was planning an even higher-altitude detonation that summer — more than 800 miles up.
Kennedy wanted to quickly assess the risks. Pressed by the Pentagon, he had already approved preparations for that extremely high blast, code-named Urraca. The president’s urgent question was whether the detonation of U.S. nuclear arms in outer space could produce enough radiation to poison humans and ruin his announced plan to land astronauts on the moon.
On July 25, 1962, he sent Dr. Garwin a telegram, inviting him to join his White House science advisory team.
Weeks later, Kennedy met with Dr. Garwin and senior advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the radiation dangers. The physicist recalled the president fearing that the recent blast “had killed the Apollo program,” which was working to put Americans on the moon. How long would the enhanced radiation last?
“A long time,” Dr. Garwin replied, adding that exactly how long was impossible to say. After some discussion of the risks and uncertainties, Dr. Garwin suggested that the danger zone might persist anywhere from two to 20 years.
That Oval Office meeting was, in all likelihood, a turning point.
On Sept. 5, 1962, Kennedy asked his national security and science advisers if the radiation hazard could “make a lunar journey prohibitive.” They discussed the risks, the lineup of impending American nuclear tests and whether the military could live without the 800-mile-high Urraca detonation.
At a National Security Council meeting two days later, the high-altitude test was canceled.
The next year, Kennedy signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear tests in outer space, in the atmosphere and under water. The weapons could be tested only deep underground. Slowly, the heightened radiation levels in the planetary belts declined through the natural process of nuclear decay.
From 1968 through 1972, NASA sent two dozen Apollo astronauts hurtling through the danger zones. Afterward, experts studying the crews’ exposures found that their doses were less than those of workers who held industrial jobs involving radiation. The astronauts suffered no debilitating health effects.
ADVISING NIXON
A Leap in H-bomb Surveillance
President Richard M. Nixon wanted Moscow and Washington to sign a historic pact to limit their nuclear arms.
Formal talks began in 1969, the year he took office. In parallel, the president and his advisers sought ways to better assess the size of the Soviet arsenal and thus verify compliance with any accord. The overall aim was to make the balance of nuclear terror — the threat of mutually assured destruction — more stable, and a stronger deterrent to war.
A new generation of spy satellites would be a central tool. High above the Earth, they would open a new lens on the secretive movements of Soviet bombers, submarines and missiles capable of hurling thermonuclear arms at the United States. Dr. Garwin, already one of President Nixon’s science advisers, threw himself into the satellite effort.
The nation’s early spy satellites, which relied on photographic film, were slow, clumsy and wasteful. It could take weeks for exposed film to get to photo analysts. And the costly orbiters, once out of film, went into the celestial junkyard.
Dr. Garwin led a team of experts who foresaw a more advanced type of spacecraft that would replace film with microelectronics and radio transmitters. Fresh images would flash to Earth. The team also called for powerful new telescopes. In effect, the spy craft were to be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at the Earth.
Even by the usual standards of federal secrecy, the satellite project was extremely hush-hush. In July 1971, Dr. Garwin had drafts of the final report delivered by a special class of courier to members of his team. They were required to read them, return them and keep no copies.
The next month, Dr. Garwin and a colleague briefed Kissinger, who backed the new electrooptical approach. Remarkably, the innovation was decades ahead of the shift in consumer cameras from film to digital.
That September, President Nixon approved a plan to develop the new spy satellite, which became the archetype for all that followed. For East-West relations, the technology was seen as raising predictability and lessening surprise, thus lowering tensions between the superpowers.
The next year, Nixon met in Moscow with the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to sign an accord that, for the first time, limited their nuclear arsenals.
Dr. Garwin received two awards for this work, one from the C.I.A. in 1996, and another in 2000 from the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the satellite fleets.
That office’s citation said the physicist had helped Kissinger “understand the critical role” the spy technology would come to play in national security — in stabilizing the uneasy standoff between foes armed with the deadliest of weapons.
ADVISING CLINTON
The Push to End H-bomb Testing
Simplicity made the Hiroshima bomb a sure thing. It had no test explosion. H-bombs were tricker. By definition, they needed multiple tests to uncover flaws and optimize results.
For decades, Dr. Garwin’s push for a comprehensive ban on test detonations rested primarily on that fact — no testing, no H-bomb. Though he saw Kennedy’s space ban as a good start, he wanted to head off not only new arms races, but also new states aspiring to the world’s most destructive weapons.
The end of the Cold War seemed like the moment. In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced plans for a treaty in which all nations would forgo all nuclear blasts, as Washington was doing unilaterally. This meant banning tests even underground, the last permissible zone.
In 1993, Dr. Garwin became chair of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board in the State Department, which guided senior federal officials, including in the White House. It also helped build public support for a test-ban agreement.
Crucially, in August 1995, Dr. Garwin helped resolve a technical dispute that was threatening to become a deal-breaker in the treaty negotiations. It centered on whether a ban should allow minuscule blasts. He addressed it as a longtime member of the Jasons, a secretive group of independent federal science advisers. In a lengthy report, the group backed the comprehensive ban, saying the United States could sign a treaty even if it ruled out minute tests.
Days later, Mr. Clinton echoed that finding in announcing that he would seek what experts called a zero-yield treaty. “I hope,” he said, “it will lead to an early consensus” at the negotiating table.
Instead, the talks dragged on. And France and China rushed to do last-minute detonations before any ban took effect.
Finally, in September 1996, a solemn procession of world government representatives, including Mr. Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Then things fell apart.
Mr. Clinton won re-election that November but now faced Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Worse, the president’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, an intern, came to light in early 1998, fueling a political firestorm that crippled the White House.
As Senate Republicans raced for a quick treaty vote, Dr. Garwin testified before the Foreign Relations Committee.
“We are better off,” he argued, “with a test ban than without it.”
Six days later, on Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the treaty. Though eventually signed by 187 nations, the treaty never entered into force because the United States and a handful of other key players failed to ratify it.
Still, Dr. Garwin and his colleagues had created a new global norm. The long, hard process of hammering out a global consensus on the merits of a ban, embraced by thermonuclear states, led to a more stable new era. Gone were the shock waves that had radiated from underground test sites and ricocheted around the globe. Since then, the United States and other main nuclear powers have tested no weapons. Now there’s a new kind of silence.
“You do these things,” Dr. Garwin told me shortly after the Senate rejected the treaty. “And if you keep at it for a long time, sometimes you win.”
ADVISING HIMSELF
The Public Debut of the H-Bomb Designer
In 1979, Edward Teller suffered a heart attack and so discovered, as he told a friend, “that I am not immortal.” While recovering, he shared his recollections on the making of the hydrogen bomb with that friend, who had brought along a tape recorder.
“So that first design,” Teller said, “was made by Dick Garwin.” He repeated the tribute to avoid any misunderstanding.
For 22 years, that recording was lost to history. By chance, it also fit nicely with Dr. Garwin’s own determination to hide his H-bomb role.
Myths spread. In 1995, “Dark Sun,” a 700-page account of the hydrogen bomb’s making, attributed its design to a committee of elder scientists. It made no mention of the Cleveland upstart.
That changed in April 2001. George A. Keyworth II, Teller’s friend, who later served as President Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, gave me a transcript of the tape recording and I wrote about it for The New York Times. It was noticed, including by Dr. Garwin and his family.
Though Teller had previously acknowledged the young physicist’s role, those mentions were buried in specialist writings and meetings. Now, suddenly — a half-century after the fact — Dr. Garwin gained wide public recognition as the H-bomb’s designer.
“That was when people really knew,” Lois, his wife, told a historian. “And people who knew Dick very, very well, and had known him for a very long time, expressed real surprise.”
After that, as much as ever, he raced ahead. The polymath lectured and wrote papers on space weapons, land mines, terrorism, pandemics, submarines, science advising, food aid programs, automatic teller machines, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the nation’s electrical grid, the disposal of radioactive waste, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament. The last entry in his comprehensive archive is dated early this year.
Around that time, I decided that the elder statesman of nuclear arms control, like Teller, was probably not going to live forever. He was 96. I had some questions.
During that interview, to my surprise, Dr. Garwin said Fermi had emphasized the wrong danger in once calling the H-bomb “an evil thing” because of its unlimited destructiveness.
“That’s not the threat,” he said. The great danger, he added, is “so many nuclear weapons,” which raise the risk of theft, missteps, accidents, unauthorized use — and the world falling from mutual deterrence into a thermonuclear abyss.
To me, that last visit with Dr. Garwin was another glimpse of a bygone era in which he struggled inconspicuously to counter an existential threat to humankind.
I asked if he had ever considered a memoir.
“I tried,” said the man known for his blunt honesty. “It’s an impossible job.”
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13) Why Mahmoud Khalil Remains in Detention as Other Protesters Are Freed
The judge in the case, Michael E. Farbiarz, has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process as Mr. Khalil passes the weeks in Jena, La.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, May 20, 2025
The judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case has moved methodically, as the justice system struggles to keep pace with the Trump administration. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times
Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was released after 58 days.
Rumeyza Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral student, was released after 45 days.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia undergraduate, was released after 16 days.
But 72 days after his arrest on March 9, Mahmoud Khalil — the country’s most prominent pro-Palestinian-protester-turned-prisoner — is still detained in Jena, La., waiting for a New Jersey federal judge to decide whether he can go free while his immigration case proceeds.
The Trump administration has invoked a rarely cited law to argue that Mr. Khalil’s presence in the country threatens its foreign-policy goal of halting antisemitism. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have argued that the government is retaliating against their client, a legal permanent resident, for participating in protests that shook Columbia University’s campus and that he should have his liberty while his immigration case is assessed.
The New Jersey judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, has been thoroughly engaged. But he has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process that have attracted enormous attention to Mr. Khalil’s case.
His meticulous approach has made the case an exemplar of Trump-era justice, in which the White House frequently moves with a speed that courts are not used to matching.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to decide whether to release their client on bail, like the other students, before ruling on the issues at the heart of the case. The judge has responded that he must deal with the procedural basics first.
Judge Farbiarz has issued numerous orders and written two lengthy rulings: a 67-page determination that he had the right to preside over the case and a 108-page opinion asserting that his control over the case had not been stripped.
In the second ruling, he acknowledged that the law’s response to cases like Mr. Khalil’s “has been the same across the board: no unnecessary delay.”
That opinion was issued on April 29.
“Mahmoud is understandably frustrated that he was the first to be detained and nine weeks later is still in detention,” said Baher Azmy, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers. “But we remain optimistic that the court will see through the patent unconstitutionality of the government’s actions here and order him released soon.”
Legal experts acknowledged that Judge Farbiarz, 51, has proceeded more slowly than other judges. But they emphasized that each judge was different and said they believed it made sense, particularly for an early-career jurist like Judge Farbiarz, to be as thorough as possible.
“In a case that has gotten this much notoriety, I think there’s every reason if you’re the judge to make sure you have all of your ducks in a row,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Judge Farbiarz knows that there is a national spotlight, not just on him but on the ability of the federal courts to handle cases like these.”
Judge Farbiarz has a reputation for thorough, methodical preparation that borders on the obsessive. Before he ascended to the bench in 2023, he was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where he headed the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit.
As a prosecutor, he led a case against one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons-in-law, and another against the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian court. He also prosecuted a Swedish citizen, Oussama Kassir, who was accused of plotting to set up a training camp for terrorists at an Oregon ranch.
Mark S. DeMarco, a defense lawyer based in the Bronx, represented Mr. Kassir. He was struck by the future Judge Farbiarz’s sense of fair play, and his thoroughness.
“All his bases were covered. There was no stone left unturned,” Mr. DeMarco remembered, adding, “He was probably one of the most prepared prosecutors I’ve gone up against as an adversary.”
After leaving the Manhattan office, the ex-prosecutor became a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, and worked on academic papers that focused on jurisdiction and due process issues involving defendants outside the United States — issues similar to those he has pondered at length in Mr. Khalil’s case.
“What’s really marked about those articles is they do not read as somebody straight out of the prosecutorial trenches,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who is friendly with the judge. “They read as written by somebody who stepped back from his own practice and really tried to get it right in terms of the legal doctrine.”
People caught up in the legal system often find that judges do not rule quickly enough to account for rapidly unfolding events. The disjuncture has been particularly notable during the second Trump administration, during which courts have struggled to keep up.
“A lot of us on the outside expect federal courts to move with the same dispatch that the executive branch can move. That’s not practicable and it’s not wise,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What separates judicial power from political power is principled legal rationale. Sometimes it takes a little time to make sure that you’ve got the right principles to inform your position.”
In Mr. Khalil’s case, the administration moved with characteristic speed, both in initially detaining him and in rationalizing his arrest.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department quickly claimed he had led activities “aligned to Hamas.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused him of “siding with terrorists,” and of participating in protests in which “pro-Hamas” fliers were handed out.
But in the weeks since, those allegations have not been substantiated. Evidence submitted in Mr. Khalil’s immigration case revealed no secretive support for Hamas. And his lawyers have pointed to comments he made on CNN saying that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement.”
His case continues to play out in two separate courts. Judge Farbiarz has the power to free him and to determine the constitutionality of the administration’s attempts to deport him.
An immigration court judge, Jamee Comans, is overseeing his immigration proceedings, which determine more narrowly whether the United States has met the legal burden for deporting him. Mr. Khalil’s next immigration court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Over the weekend, friends and supporters of Mr. Khalil held a “people’s graduation” event in Manhattan, acknowledging that if he were free, he would have walked in a Columbia University commencement this week.
Mr. Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, was there with the couple’s infant son, Deen, who was born on April 21. Speaking through tears, Dr. Abdalla said she had looked forward to her husband getting to experience his commencement ceremony.
“Like witnessing the birth of our son, Deen, and the first precious month of his life, this moment was stolen from him,” she said.
Eryn Davis contributed reporting.
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14) Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center
The Department of Justice also announced it was dropping a trespass charge against the city’s mayor stemming from the same episode.
By Luis Ferré-SadurnÃ, Published May 19, 2025, Updated May 20, 2025
The Justice Department charged a New Jersey congresswoman with assaulting federal agents during a clash outside a Newark immigration detention center and dropped a trespass charge against the city’s mayor that arose from the same episode, the department said Monday.
Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, disclosed the move in a post on X, saying that the congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, had been charged “for assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” when she visited the detention center with two other Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey on May 9.
“No one is above the law — politicians or otherwise,” Ms. Habba said in a statement. “It is the job of this office to uphold justice impartially, regardless of who you are. Now we will let the justice system work.”
She added that she had sought a resolution without bringing criminal charges, but that Ms. McIver had declined.
In a statement on Monday, Ms. McIver blamed federal law enforcement for instigating the clash, saying that “ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation.”
“The charges against me are purely political — they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight,” she said.
Ms. Habba also announced that she had dismissed a misdemeanor charge for trespass against Ras J. Baraka, the Democratic mayor of Newark, whose arrest had precipitated the flare-up with federal agents after he sought to join the lawmakers on their tour of the detention center but was denied entry.
She said she had dismissed the charge “for the sake of moving forward.”
In a statement, Mr. Baraka welcomed the dropping of the charges but said he would “continue to advocate for the humane treatment of detainees” at the detention center, known as Delaney Hall, and ensure it complies with city code and regulations.
Ms. McIver and the two other lawmakers — Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez — have pushed back against the Trump administration’s contention that the legislators stormed into the detention center. The federal government’s narrative has also been contradicted by video footage and by witnesses who were at the scene.
The lawmakers visited the detention center on May 9 to conduct an oversight visit. They said that they were allowed inside to tour the 1,000-bed facility, which opened this month amid resistance from local officials who are opposed to President Trump’s deportation efforts.
Ms. McIver and the other lawmakers, as well as the mayor’s supporters, formed a physical circle around Mr. Baraka, video shows, leading to jostling and a confusing scrum that the Trump administration has sought to cast as a violent mob attack on federal officers. Federal officials arrested Mr. Baraka and charged him with trespassing, a misdemeanor; Mr. Baraka had said he was being selectively prosecuted.
Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle — from recordings by protesters to footage from body cameras released by the Department of Homeland Security — to accuse each other of instigating the altercation, which did not appear to lead to any injuries.
Footage from a body-worn camera shared by Fox News shows the lawmakers and a group of officers outside the facility’s fence. At one point, Ms. McIver appears to make contact with a law enforcement officer wearing fatigues and a face mask as she is finding her way to the gate.
A second video captured a verbal disagreement between Ms. McIver and several officers. The lawmaker, who is standing with her back against a car and is surrounded by officers in tactical gear, can be heard screaming at officers and saying, “Ma’am, he just assaulted me.”
After the incident, Ms. McIver said she had been shoved by officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
In a joint statement on Monday, the Democratic leadership of the House called the charges against Ms. McIver “morally bankrupt” and said they lacked “any basis in law or fact.”
Paul J. Fishman, a lawyer for Ms. McIver, called the decision to charge the congresswoman “spectacularly inappropriate.”
“As a member of Congress, she has the right and responsibility to see how ICE is treating detainees,” said Mr. Fishman, who previously served as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. “Rather than facilitating that inspection, ICE agents chose to escalate what should have been a peaceful situation into chaos.”
After Mr. Baraka was taken into custody, the three lawmakers entered Delaney Hall and took the tour they had been waiting for.
Republicans have seized on the episode to portray Democrats as more interested in protecting the immigrants with criminal records they said are being held inside the facility than U.S. citizens.
In television interviews and on social media, Department of Homeland Security officials have for days accused the lawmakers of “storming” into the facility, suggesting last week that assault charges were looming. The agency shared a video on X that it says shows Ms. McIver assaulting an ICE agent.
Representative Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, introduced a resolution seeking to strip the lawmakers of their committee assignments in the House of Representatives this week. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, called for Ms. McIver to be expelled from Congress.
For weeks, Democratic officials in New Jersey have protested the opening of Delaney Hall, which is expected to significantly expand the federal government’s detention capacity as it ramps up immigration arrests across the country.
In February, ICE entered into a $1 billion contract with GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, to convert the building into a detention center. But Mr. Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey, galvanized opposition against the detention center, arguing that it had opened without the proper city permits or inspections.
The controversy engulfing the facility drew the attention of the New Jersey lawmakers, who visited the facility on May 9 to inspect the conditions. The mayor tried to join the congressional delegation but was not allowed to do so.
He was initially allowed past the fence, according to video he released last week that he said showed him being invited past the gates before he was arrested, seemingly contradicting accusations that he had barged into the facility without permission. He was then asked to leave multiple times and exited voluntarily, according to video footage and the mayor’s aides.
However, federal agents wearing face coverings and military fatigues appeared outside the gates to arrest the mayor, video shows, leading to a chaotic scene.
In one video, Ms. McIver and Ms. Watson Coleman walk a few paces away before Ms. McIver stops and turns to face the officers. “You can’t talk to a congresswoman like that,” she says. “You will pay.”
Ms. Watson Coleman said earlier this month, “The notion that I or any of my colleagues ‘body slammed’ armed federal officers is absurd.”
“D.H.S. is lying because they know their agents were out of line,” she said.
On Thursday, after a court appearance, Mr. Baraka said he had been targeted by the Trump administration, which he said had fabricated his arrest to humiliate him.
On Monday, Ms. Habba — a lawyer for Mr. Trump whom the president appointed to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey — shifted gears. She said that the federal government had decided to dismiss the charge against Mr. Baraka after “extensive consideration.”
“In the spirit of public interest, I have invited the mayor to tour Delaney Hall,” she said. “The government has nothing to hide at this facility, and I will personally accompany the mayor so he can see that firsthand.”
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15) Israel’s Allies Denounce Its New Gaza Offensive
Britain, France and Canada, all powerful supporters of Israel, called plans for an escalation of the Gaza war “disproportionate” and “egregious.”
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 20, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening an Israeli takeover of Gaza and the forced relocation of Palestinian civilians into designated areas. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Britain, France, and Canada issued a rare public reprimand of Israel, demanding that it cease its renewed military offensive in Gaza — a call that laid bare growing rifts between Israel and traditional Western allies, prompting a furious Israeli response on Tuesday.
“We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism,” a joint statement by the three powerful allies said late on Monday, adding: “But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.”
They condemned the expanded Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza and monthslong restrictions on humanitarian aid as “egregious actions” — some of the sharpest rhetoric yet seen by major Western countries long supportive of Israel.
“If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response,” the statement said.
International discontent with Israel is reaching new heights more than 19 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the Israeli war in Gaza. While governments worldwide rushed to back Israel after the assault, diplomatic support faded as the Israeli campaign led to a skyrocketing death toll in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu denounced the latest criticism early on Tuesday, saying the three countries had handed a “huge prize” to Hamas. He claimed they were tacitly encouraging a repeat of the Oct. 7 attacks, which saw some 1,200 killed in Israel and 250 taken hostage.
“This is a war of civilization over barbarism,” Mr. Netanyahu said on social media. “Israel will continue to defend itself by just means until total victory is achieved.”
European officials had been privately expressing “increasing frustration and even anger with Israeli actions in Gaza,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
It was not immediately what further actions Britain, France and Canada intended to take if Israel did not heed their warning. But the public statement by three major Israeli allies on Monday night was “a significant change in tone and message,” said Mr. Lovatt.
In March, Israel ended a two-month cease-fire with Hamas that would have freed the hostages in exchange for an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal. Mr. Netanyahu has said Israel could not accept anything less than for Hamas to disarm and for its leaders to leave Gaza and go into exile.
Mr. Netanyahu is now threatening an Israeli takeover of Gaza and the forced relocation of Palestinian civilians into designated areas. Israel has already barred humanitarian aid from Gaza for more than two months, leading the United Nations to warn of possible famine.
Critics say the pending military operation would have an even more devastating impact on Palestinian civilians. More than 53,000 people have already been killed in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
And it is far from clear whether an even more intense Israeli assault would defeat Hamas. Israeli forces have already reduced much of Gaza to rubble, while Hamas has fought a stubborn insurgency and recruited thousands of new fighters to its ranks.
The United States, Israel’s most powerful patron and staunchest supporter, has not publicly criticized the renewed Israeli offensive. But President Trump has increasingly bypassed Mr. Netanyahu, cutting a separate deal with Hamas to free the last living American hostage and skipping Israel on his trip to Middle East.
Much of the international criticism has centered around the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, a direct consequence of a two-month Israeli blockade that barred food, medicine and other essential relief from entering the Palestinian enclave.
Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled. Doctors reported malnutrition among children, and the United Nations recently said that people across the enclave were at risk of famine.
Over the weekend, Israel finally said it would begin allowing some humanitarian aid into Gaza. But authorities let only five trucks in on Monday, barely a trickle in the face of enormous needs. Even those trucks had yet to be collected by Tuesday morning by U.N. officials, who require Israeli permission to reach the area near Gaza’s border with Israel.
European officials met in Brussels on Tuesday, in part to discuss a Dutch request to examine whether Israel had violated its association agreement with the European Union over grave human rights violations against the Palestinians.
On Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, said the European Union could ultimately decide to suspend its agreement with Israel unless the Gaza offensive were halted. That would put Israel in the same category as Syria, Liberia and Zimbabwe, among others.
“The blind violence and the humanitarian blockade by the Israeli government have made Gaza into a deathtrap,” Mr. Barrot said in a radio interview.
Nick Cumming-Bruce, Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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